The run-up to the legend fails for Bradley Wiggins but the English baronet in his last road race leaves the Roubaix all in all with dignity, after having also made his fans hope for a coup with an attack on the pavement five-star difficulty in Mons en Pevele, an action that however died down within a few kilometres. Wiggins finished 18th with a group of chasers. Just 31″ had passed since the princely sprint with which John Degenkolb regulated, in the historic concrete Velodrome, a group of seven runners who had formed at the head of the race at the end of the last stretch of paved road.
Behind him, resigned in the face of so much power, Zdenek Stybar and Greg Van Avermaet, a subscriber to honor placements. For Degenkolb, already winner of the Sanremo, a one-two finish in two classics-monuments in the same season, achieved only by Sean Kelly in 1986: a feat that gives the Giant-Alpecin champion a definitive leap in quality, projecting him into the exclusive club of rulers of one-day racing.
A club in which Alexander Kristoff has now entered by right, with his exploits in the last two years, even if in fact the Norwegian is one of the great losers of this Roubaix having started from Compiègne with the favors of the forecast after the sumptuous victory in the Tour of Flanders. The leader of the Katusha, this time, had to settle for winning the sprint from the group of Wiggins, the one of the beaten ones, followed by Peter Sagan, increasingly disappointing, even if as an alibi for the Slovakian from Tinkoff-Saxo , there is a puncture at the crucial moment of the race.
Punctures and falls have always been part of the cycling world, especially of races such as the Roubaix, even if in this edition a spring climate made the pavement of the porphyry cubes less difficult. And the lucky star served to avoid a disaster when a TGV train passed, at very high speed, a level crossing which was closed but which some runners had jumped over and others were about to do so in order not to be detached.
Luckily nothing happened and this Roubaix – game without its two rulers, Boonen and Cancellara – will go down in history for Wiggins' farewell without a bang (who from tomorrow will only think about the hour record and the Rio Olympics) and for the performance-masterpiece by Degenkolb, which gives Germany its second success in the very classic pavé, repeating the very distant one by Josef Fischer in the first edition of 1896.
