Paris-Roubaix 2014

The road

At the start

Cancellara chasing the double again

Compiègne, a week after the Ronde, and Fabian Cancellara arrives having won it — the double he completed in 2010 and again in 2013, so the question is who can possibly stop him. Omega Pharma answer with numbers: Tom Boonen, four times a winner here, alongside Niki Terpstra and Zdeněk Štybar. Twenty-eight sectors wait, and the full-tilt sprint into the Arenberg forest is where the real race begins.

How it was won

1. 172 km to go

   Tilloy cracks it open

   Off the end of sector 14 the attacks stop being speculative. De Backer, Tjallingii, Ladagnous, Martinez and Geraint Thomas steal away — while Sagan is riding at the back of the bunch and Cancellara is off the pace.

2. 266 km to go

   Boonen puts his cards on the table

   On the pavé at Beuvry-la-Forêt the four-time winner launches alone, bridges to the leaders and immediately starts driving. Two sectors later at Orchies he accelerates again to thin them out, then fumes at the wheels that won't come through.

3. 335 km to go

   Sagan refuses to let Boonen go

   The leaders have 50 seconds and Roubaix is on a knife edge. With 35km left Sagan drags Maarten Wynants out of the bunch and into no-man's-land; it takes them 13 kilometres of suffering to reach Boonen's group.

4. 420 km to go

   Cancellara and Vanmarcke on Camphin-en-Pévèle

   The Belkin leader has two teammates up the road and attacks anyway, Cancellara going with him. They cross on the legendary sector and reopen the whole race — just as Sagan, all youthful hope, slips away alone off the front.

5. 517 km to go

   Carrefour de l'Arbre

   The sector that usually decides Paris-Roubaix spits out Cancellara, Vanmarcke, Štybar and Degenkolb, who haul back a Sagan long since gone into the red. And still it settles nothing: Terpstra, Wiggins, Thomas and Langeveld drag the rest across before the last sector.

6. 68 km to go

   Terpstra slips the leash at Willems

   Eleven riders, all of them believing, and De Backer hammering the cobbles for Degenkolb's sprint. In the headwind everyone hesitates for a second or two — and in that gap Niki Terpstra goes. Fifteen seconds, instantly, and he never looks back.

7. 7At the line

   Alone in the velodrome

   He rides the final symbolic sector of pavé at ease and enters the Roubaix velodrome to a roar, alone. A lap and a half at a steady tempo, a shout, both arms thrown out — the first Dutch winner since Servais Knaven in 2001.

The result