Paris-Roubaix 2016

The road

At the start

Sagan's double, Cancellara's last Roubaix

Compiègne, and Peter Sagan starts as the man who won Flanders in the rainbow jersey a week ago — nobody has taken both in those colours since Rik Van Looy in 1962. Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara are the names everyone else watches, and this is the Swiss rider's last Hell of the North. Rain is forecast. Somewhere in the bunch, Mathew Hayman lines up for a sixteenth Roubaix, five weeks after breaking his arm.

How it was won

1. 1187 km to go

   Sixteen go, and Hayman is in it

   Sixty-seven kilometres of attacking out of Compiègne end when a group of sixteen finally sticks. Chavanel, Erviti, Popovych — riding the last day of his career — and an Australian domestique named Mathew Hayman go up the road, and they reach the first pavé a minute clear.

2. 2104 km to go

   Tony Martin detonates the chase

   On the Haveluy cobbles Tony Martin puts his time-trial engine down and the big chase group simply falls apart behind him. Only Boonen, Stannard, Boasson Hagen, Wagner and Durbridge can hold the wheel — a race within the race, with Sagan and Cancellara already more than a minute adrift.

3. 366 km to go

   The two races become one

   Coming off the Beuvry-la-Forêt cobbles, sixty-five kilometres out, Boonen's group swallows what is left of the morning break. Hayman has been on the road since kilometre sixty-seven and is still at the front.

4. 449 km to go

   Cancellara goes down in the mud

   Vanmarcke lifts the pace on Mons-en-Pévèle and the front group thins again. Forty-five seconds back, Cancellara's wheels slide off the crown of the cobbles in a muddy stretch and the Swiss goes down; Sagan somehow lifts himself and his bike over the wreckage. Terpstra and others do not. The favourites' race is over.

5. 520 km to go

   Stannard cuts it to five

   Twenty kilometres out, on Camphin-en-Pévèle, Ian Stannard attacks and only four men go with him: Boonen, Vanmarcke, Boasson Hagen and Hayman. That is Paris-Roubaix now — five riders, and the underdog among them has been racing since Noyon.

6. 617 km to go

   Vanmarcke twice on the Arbre

   Knowing he cannot win a sprint, Sep Vanmarcke throws himself at the Carrefour de l'Arbre with seventeen kilometres left. The four scramble; they peg him; he goes again — and is finally brought back on the far side of the next sector.

7. 7At the line

   Hayman winds it up from the front

   Hayman and Boonen enter the velodrome first, Vanmarcke drags himself back on, and five come to the bell. Hayman opens the sprint far too early with the four-time winner sitting on his wheel — and holds. Boonen, boxed in for a heartbeat, never closes it. Sixteen starts, a broken arm five weeks ago, and Mathew Hayman wins Paris-Roubaix in tears.

The result