WHY CYCLING NEEDED WOUT TO WIN ROUBAIX

A Sunday in Hell, and finally a contest.

Wout van Aert won Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, taking the first cobbled Monument of his career in the velodrome, in a two-up sprint against Tadej Pogacar, at the end of the fastest edition this race has ever seen. The average speed was 48.91 kph. Jasper Stuyven finished third, Mathieu van der Poel fourth, and I want to talk about why this one mattered beyond the result.

The Pogacar problem

Cycling in 2026 had started to feel predictable, and I think we should be honest about that. Pogacar arrived at Roubaix chasing all five Monuments in a single season — the full set of Milan-San Remo, Flanders, Roubaix, Liege and Lombardia inside one calendar year — something no rider in the history of the sport has ever managed. He had the form to make it look plausible rather than fanciful.

That is not a criticism of Tadej. He is the best bike racer most of us have ever watched, and possibly the best ever, full stop. But when one rider is that dominant over a long enough stretch, every race starts to look like the same race, and the reason to set an alarm on a Sunday morning quietly thins out. Roubaix did not need a fairytale on Sunday. It needed a genuine contest, and for the first time in a long while, it got one.

The rider cycling kept losing

To understand why this particular winner matters, you have to go back to 2018. That was Wout's first Paris-Roubaix, ridden in a Veranda's Willems-Crelan jersey, and it was the day his teammate Michael Goolaerts collapsed on the cobbles and never got up. Eight years later, standing in front of the press at the Roubaix velodrome on Sunday evening, the first thing Wout did with his win was bring Goolaerts back into the room. There are races that mark a rider for life, and for Wout, this has always been one of them. Every spring since 2018 he has come back to these cobbles carrying that memory with him.

Two years ago, the relationship with Roubaix almost ended for good.

In March 2024, at Dwars door Vlaanderen, Wout crashed at speed with 67km still to ride and got up from it with a broken collarbone, broken ribs, and a classics campaign already over. He put himself back together across the summer and arrived at the Vuelta in August looking like himself again, winning three stages in the opening week and starting to feel like the rider he had been. Then on stage 16, on a wet descent, he slid out, hit a rocky edge, and destroyed his knee. Surgery followed, the season ended, and the word from inside Visma was that this was the kind of injury that finishes careers for lesser riders.

The 2025 comeback was a strange thing to watch. On paper it was clean enough. He won a cyclocross race at Dendermonde in January, took a Giro stage in the spring with a sprint that beat Isaac Del Toro, and by late summer a working version of Wout was back on the road. From the inside, though, it was a different story. He said as much in interviews through the winter, admitting that he no longer dared to throw himself into the dangerous part of a finish the way he used to. The body had healed. The head had not caught up with it.

That was the rider who rolled down the start ramp at Compiegne on Sunday morning. Not the prodigy of three years ago, not the pre-race favourite on any honest list, and in some corners of the cycling internet, a rider whose best days had been left behind on a roadside in Spain.

What actually happened on Sunday

The race itself was brutal and fast in roughly equal measure. Both Van Aert and Pogacar dealt with punctures and bike changes, the sort of misfortune that ended other men's days and somehow did not end theirs. Van der Poel had the mechanical luck fall the wrong way at the wrong moment and never closed the gap back, finishing fourth. Stuyven rode the smart, experienced race he always seems to find in this corner of the calendar and took third.

At the front, when the dust and the cobble grit settled, it came down to two men — Wout and Tadej — riding side by side into the Roubaix velodrome.

Let me put this as plainly as I can. If you had told me before the start on Sunday that Wout van Aert would outsprint Tadej Pogacar in a two-up finish at Roubaix, after the fastest edition in history, on legs that had been through what his had been through, I would have laughed at you. He did it anyway.

Why this is the story cycling needed

The sport does not need Tadej to lose. What it needs, every so often, is a reminder that he is beatable on the right day, by the right rider, for the right reasons. On Sunday, Wout van Aert was that rider: a man who had been broken twice in 2024, quietly written off in some corners since, and who lined up five years out from his last Monument, which was Milan-San Remo in 2020.

If you are part of our community, you can probably see where I am going with this.

A lot of the people I talk to every week — whether that is on the podcast, inside the Not Done Yet coaching program, or on the Clubhouse calls — are somewhere on Wout's curve. Some are coming back from an injury, some are training through something that knocked them sideways, and quite a few are watching the clock and wondering whether the best version of themselves is in front of them or already behind. The answer to that question got written out in public on Sunday across 258.3km of road and cobbles, on the hardest one-day course on the calendar.

The best version of you is not a function of what has happened to you. It is a function of whether you keep showing up for the work, week in and week out, long after it has stopped being fun. Wout kept showing up. Eight years of it, two of them spent on an operating table.

He's not done yet. Neither are you.

The takeaway

Watch the highlights again this week and look at Wout's face as he crosses the line in the velodrome. It is not relief, and it is not triumph either. It is the look of a rider finally getting hold of something he has been chasing for a third of his adult life, against the hardest possible version of the obstacle. Cycling needed this one, and the sport is a better one this morning for the fact that he got it.

If you have been thinking about getting structured with your training, there has never been a better time. We just opened 30 places for Cohort 2 of Not Done Yet — personalised coaching across training, nutrition, strength, recovery, and accountability. 7-day free trial, $195/mo, cancel anytime. Applications close Friday.

Ride on.

Anthony