Paris-Roubaix 2017

The road

At the start

Boonen's last race, and a record fifth

Compiègne, and Tom Boonen has one ride left in him: win here and he has five cobblestones and the record, and by Sunday evening he is retired either way. Peter Sagan is the man expected to stop him, still sore from his crash at Flanders a week ago. Greg Van Avermaet has taken Omloop, E3 and Gent-Wevelgem this spring and has never won a Monument. Twenty-nine sectors, a new one at Viesly, and a tailwind pushing north.

How it was won

1. 1163 km to go

   Ninety-six kilometres before a break sticks

   A tailwind pushes the peloton out of Compiègne at fifty and a half kilometres in the first hour, and for ninety-six of them nothing is allowed to go. Yannick Martinez, Jelle Wallays and Mickaël Delage finally get clear just as the first cobbles at Troisvilles arrive, and are never given more than forty-five seconds. This is going to be the fastest Paris-Roubaix ever ridden.

2. 296 km to go

   Arenberg, with Van Avermaet behind it

   The trench takes the race with the leaders a minute up, Wallays and Stijn Vandenbergh shedding Delage on the worst cobbles in France while Boonen and Sagan haul the bunch through the dust behind. Greg Van Avermaet is not in that bunch: trouble on the section into Wallers has cost him forty seconds, and he spends the far side of the forest riding back with Alexander Kristoff for company. Niki Terpstra is already gone, down hard on the pavé near Maing.

3. 383 km to go

   Sagan goes at Hornaing

   Seventy-five kilometres out, off the end of the Hornaing cobbles, the world champion attacks with Maciej Bodnar, and Daniel Oss and Jasper Stuyven get across; half a minute opens in the space of a few kilometres. Then Sagan's rear wheel goes down. He and Bodnar drop out of their own move, and Oss and Stuyven ride on without them.

4. 450 km to go

   Mons-en-Pévèle sorts the chase

   Oss and Stuyven come to the second five-star sector with sixteen seconds on three chasers and forty-eight on everyone else. Sagan hits the cobbles hard with Štybar on him, the field tears open, and out the far side the front of the race is fourteen riders — Van Avermaet and Oss, Boonen and Štybar, Degenkolb and Stuyven, Langeveld, Moscon and everyone else who still matters, with nine sectors to go.

5. 540 km to go

   Oss up the road, and the split behind him

   Forty kilometres out Daniel Oss goes clear before Pont-Thibaut and takes twenty-four seconds, which turns out to decide the race. Štybar attacks the group behind; Langeveld, Roelandts, Stuyven and Moscon go with him, and so does Van Avermaet, who then does no work at all because the man up the road is his teammate. Sagan punctures a second time and is finished. Boonen is on the wrong side of it, half a minute down, with five sectors to rescue his farewell.

6. 617 km to go

   Van Avermaet goes on the Arbre

   The seven catch Oss with twenty-four kilometres left. Langeveld lights up Camphin-en-Pévèle and burns Oss off the back of it. And then the Carrefour de l'Arbre, where this race gets decided more often than anywhere else on the road: Van Avermaet attacks into it, Langeveld is the only man who can go straight with him, Štybar drags himself across. Moscon and Stuyven are dropped, Boonen's chase is thirty-six seconds back and closing on nothing, and three riders have Paris-Roubaix between them.

7. 7At the line

   Five in the velodrome, one Olympic champion

   Fifty seconds inside the last ten kilometres, and Štybar — who has sat on for most of the finale — throws one more attack at it with four to go and cannot get away. So the three come into the velodrome watching each other, and the hesitation costs them: Moscon and Stuyven scramble back on inside the last two hundred and fifty metres and make it a sprint of five. Moscon opens it, Štybar comes past him, and Greg Van Avermaet comes past them both. Olympic champion, and now a Monument. Twelve seconds later Tom Boonen finishes thirteenth in the last race of his career.

The result