Fatality sours Sagan Paris-Roubaix victory
THE death of Belgian rider Michael Goolaerts at the Paris-Roubaix one-day classic overshadowed the event on Sunday.
Television footage showed the 23-year-old receiving CPR treatment from medics by the side of the road after he collapsed during the second cobbled sector of the 257km race.
He was taken to Lille university hospital but failed to recover.
“It is with unimaginable sadness that we have to communicate the passing of our rider and friend Michael Goolaerts. He died Sunday evening at 22.40 in Lille hospital,” his team Veranda’s Willems-Crelan said in a statement.
Goolaerts is the third Belgian rider to die in recent years during a race.
Antoine Demoitie died after a crash with a motorbike during the Gent-Wevelgem road classic in 2016.
In 2011, Wouter Weylandt died after crashing during the Giro d’Italia. On Sunday, the Paris-Roubaix race went on without Goolaerts and world champion Peter Sagan became the first rider since 1981 to claim the Queen of the Classics with the rainbow jersey on his shoulders.
The Slovakian accelerated 55km from the finish line at the Roubaix Velodrome to catch the day’s breakaway riders and get rid of the strongest of them, Swiss Silvan Dillier, in a sprint finish.
Tour of Flanders champion Niki Terpstra, of the Netherlands, came home third in the race dubbed the “Hell of the North” because of the difficult terrain it covers.
Terpstra and his Quick Step-Floors team, who had been dominant on the Flanders classics so far, simply could not contain the BoraHansgrohe leader Sagan.
Once the man who won the last three road cycling world championships jumped away from the group of main favourites, he never looked back.