Paris-Roubaix 2018

The road

At the start

Quick-Step's spring, and 54km of pavé

Compiègne, and the cobbled spring ends here: 257 kilometres north to Roubaix over twenty-nine sectors and 54.5 kilometres of pavé. Quick-Step have won almost everything this month — Terpstra took the Ronde last Sunday, and Gilbert is back for the first time since 2007, chasing all five Monuments. Greg Van Avermaet defends his title. Peter Sagan, underwhelming in Flanders, has never finished higher than sixth here.

How it was won

1. 1164 km to go

   The first cobbles bite

   Ninety-three flat kilometres out of Compiègne, and the race breaks apart the instant it hits stone. A mass crash on sector 29 holds up defending champion Greg Van Avermaet and Oliver Naesen, and inside the hour Démare, Moscon, Štybar, Degenkolb and Kristoff have all lost ground to a fall or a mechanical.

2. 2158 km to go

   Michael Goolaerts goes down

   On the second sector, Viesly to Briastre, Michael Goolaerts of Verandas Willems-Crelan suffers a cardiac arrest and falls at the roadside. He is 23, riding his first Paris-Roubaix. The helicopter lifts him to Lille; he will not survive the night.

3. 396 km to go

   Arenberg, and Démare is gone

   Two and a half kilometres of broken, unaligned stone through the forest gloom. Mike Teunissen and Philippe Gilbert accelerate into it and drag a handful of escapees back; behind them Arnaud Démare slides off the tail of the peloton and never comes again.

4. 476 km to go

   Štybar tries the Quick-Step script

   Teunissen and Gilbert have been swallowed. Zdeněk Štybar goes alone on the cobbles of Warlaing to Brillon, seventy-six kilometres out, and for a few minutes it looks like every other Belgian Sunday this spring — but the peloton refuses this one too.

5. 555 km to go

   Sagan attacks on sector 12

   Van Avermaet's second dig strings the peloton into a line, and out of the line comes the rainbow jersey. Sagan goes on sector 12, Auchy-lez-Orchies to Bersée, with fifty-five kilometres left, and does not sit down until he has caught what is left of the morning break. Wallays, Dillier and Bystrøm take him in. Behind, the chase argues with itself; twenty seconds becomes a minute. Everything Sagan has been accused of not being, he answers here on three kilometres of stone.

6. 617 km to go

   Carrefour de l'Arbre

   Only Silvan Dillier is still with him, and the Swiss champion is still taking his turns on the tarmac. Sagan leads onto the five-star cobbles with seventeen kilometres to go, and behind them the chase runs out of road and out of gas.

7. 7At the line

   The velodrome

   Dillier hits the boards first, the last man standing from the morning break. Sagan comes round him in the final seventy-five metres — the first reigning world champion to win Paris-Roubaix since Bernard Hinault in 1981. Terpstra prises third out of the chase in the closing hectometres.

The result