THE KING OF CLASSICS

The biggest surprise about Philippe Gilbert winning Paris-Roubaix was that we were all so surprised by it. Gilbert has won dozens of races through his ability to accelerate up short steep hills - he’s won Amstel, Liège, Flèche, San Sebastián, multiple grand tour stages and even Lombardia, thanks to that uphill sprint. But when he started making noises, a couple of seasons ago, about wanting to win a career grand slam of monuments, it was widely posited that ParisRoubaix would be the hardest nut of the five to crack. With no hills to speak of, and a parcours which favours bigger riders who can repeat longer, more powerful surges, the Queen of Classics looked beyond him. Furthermore, he’d only ridden it twice: 52nd place in 2007 and 15th in 2018.

However, it might not have escaped Gilbert’s notice that in 2016, the winner Mat Hayman had put himself in the early break, and last year’s runner-up Silvan Dillier, had done the same. Gilbert’s too big a rider to be allowed into an early break in a classic, but the early part of the 2019 Roubaix was so chaotic that an early break didn’t really go; instead the race split and reformed repeatedly over 150km.

Gilbert made his move at 67km, following Nils Politt. The German’s was a smart wheel to follow - he’d quietly come seventh the year before, and fifth in the previous week’s Flanders. The two made good their escape, then Gilbert’s big advantage came into operation - every chase was hampered and stymied by his Deceuninck team-mates. A group finally did make it across, but Politt and Gilbert turned out to be fresher and they got away again at 15km to go, this time for good. Gilbert easily dispatched Politt in the sprint, leaving him with one final piece of the jigsaw: a Milan-San Remo win, and a place in cycling history.