Alastair MacKellar enters the Roubaix velodrome to a polite smattering of applause from the fans who haven’t yet turned their attention away from the track to the women’s race finally unfolding on the big screens.
The 24-year-old Australian finishes his mandatory lap-and-a-half of cycling’s most iconic dilapidated outdoor track and wheels over to the once bustling but now basically empty inner field adjacent to the back straight, where a soigneur and press officer from his EF Education-EasyPost team are waiting.
He unclips and stares off into the distance, behind his bulky POC glasses, barely uttering a word before the press officer asks him to recap his first experience of the Hell of the North. MacKellar, a late call-up to EF’s Paris-Roubaix team, had just spent the last three hours mostly alone, battling exhaustion and northern France’s infernal cobbles.
With around 150km to go, on the third of the race’s 30 cobbled sectors, MacKellar dropped back to shepherd his team leader Kasper Asgreen to the bunch, effectively ending his own stint at the front in the process. Definitively dropped soon after, he thought – like a few other stragglers – about packing it in at the Arenberg Forest, but decided to plough on, ticking the sectors off one by one.
And now he’s finished Paris-Roubaix. Or so he thought.
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MacKellar crossed the line in Roubaix 29 minutes and 19 seconds after Wout van Aert outsprinted Tadej Pogačar to win his first cobbled monument. He was the final rider to enter the velodrome, almost five minutes after Frenchman Benjamin Thomas.
I was one of the one of the few remaining journalists waiting in the velodrome for MacKellar’s arrival, as the rest rushed off to file their reports in the frantic hour before the women’s finale took place.
But MacKellar certainly wasn’t riding Paris-Roubaix at a leisurely pace. In fact, such was the speed of this year’s men’s edition – the fastest in the race’s history – his finishing time of 5:46.11 was almost 8 minutes quicker than Pater Sagan’s winning effort of 5:54.06 back in 2018.
However, it wasn’t enough for MacKellar to even register a placing at his debut Roubaix, the Australian missing the eight per cent time cut by three minutes and 58 seconds. All that effort, determination, and grit to not even finish in last place – the perfect encapsulation of the cruelty of professional cycling, and of its cruellest race.
It’s no surprise, then, that MacKellar appeared bitterly disappointed when I spoke to him a few minutes after he’d finished.
“It was a pretty mentally challenging day. I was out the back a fair bit earlier than I would have liked,” he told road.cc.
“Kasper [Asgreen] had a flat maybe third sector in and it was already chaos. So I think it took him a while to change that. I dropped back to try and help him get back and then we’re in the cars and it was full gas and I did the little bit I could, which wasn’t much.
“And then, it was pretty well solo or with a couple guys from then on to get here. It’s a pretty mentally challenging day more than physically.”
> Letters forwarded from Hell: Paris-Roubaix, in the words of the pros
Reflecting on his long, solo ride to the finish, he continued: “At first I didn’t think I was going to finish. I was like, I’ll get to the Arenberg, find someone, pull out. And then on the Arenberg a few guys I was with were stepping off the bike and I was like, I’ll just do another couple sectors and see.
“And then a couple sectors becomes another couple more and you’re like, oh, I’ve got 70km to go. Anyway, you just keep pushing and then you get to a point where you’re like, I’ll just finish it, right? It’s a cool one to finish.
“I had no idea what to expect. I wasn’t able to do a recon because I was racing earlier this week and I’d never even ridden proper cobbles, so I was kind of going in quite blind.
“But I mean, it lives up to the hype. The cobbles are hard, but as soon as you do the Arenberg, every other sector feels easy because that one’s bloody gnarly.
“It’s a bit mixed emotions because I’m the last rider and no one ever wants to come last in a bike race. But I think if there’s a race you want to finish and come last in, it’s this one. So a bit mixed emotions and maybe a bit disappointed now, but I think I’ll look back at it in the next couple days or weeks and be glad I even finished.
“So, if I ever have to come back at some point in my career, I know what to expect. I know what I can do and I can probably get more value out of it for both the team and myself. I guess now I know I can finish it, which is a nice thing.”
14 thoughts on “The man who raced Paris-Roubaix 7 minutes faster than Peter Sagan… only to miss the time cut”
So 900 words for the last-placed finisher in the men’s race, which is 900 words more than the first-placed finisher in the women’s race got. If this is a deliberate windup, it’s working!
Hi Rendel,
I spent the entire Paris-Roubaix weekend embedded within Picnic PostNL’s women’s team and am currently working on a long-form feature/podcast on the experience, which should be out soon. I hope you enjoy it.
Best,
Ryan
While that’s good news, it’s several days since the women’s race. Wout’s win was wonderful and deserved considerable coverage. However, that doesn’t excuse RoadCC barely mentioning the women’s race.
I hate to sound defensive over this, but the two stories published on the morning of the races were about the Paris-Roubaix Femmes, our social media output on Instagram Stories in the days leading up to the race and the day of it largely focused on the women, and the first story I published on Sunday night was a 50/50 split words-wise between the men and women (‘Letters forwarded from Hell’).
In-depth features also take time (believe it or not), with the Picnic one set to be published to coincide with our normal podcasting schedule. I spent three days with Picnic’s women’s team, chatting to the staff, the riders, following them on their recon rides – I’m very excited about the story and for everyone to read/hear it.
We’re a small team and not, remember, a quote-unquote ‘racing site’ like Cyclingnews, so it’s difficult to cover everything that we would want to. And Paris-Roubaix is just one race (albeit a big one), I believe our record on covering women’s racing in general speaks for itself.
Don’t worry – it doesn’t sound like much of a defence. 😜
(But fair play recognising the specific complaint of there being no mention of the winner / result below.)
All valid points but if you’re such a small site how come you managed three or four articles on the men’s race? I think the worst thing about the site is that you not once mentioned who actually won the women’s race. Very poor show!
Lucky you! Great, look forward to reading/hearing that but there still should’ve been some news item in the live blog on Monday giving the women’s race results, given that there was a long feature on the men’s race and no fewer than three separate items on MVDP’s cleats alone!
I agree with you there, I hadn’t checked and assumed we had covered the results on the blog (I was travelling home all day, so wasn’t keeping up to speed with things), though I did see we covered the Brand crash.
If the cleat issue had have happened to someone in the women’s race, that would have been our lead story on Monday. It was a tech story, whether it happened in the men’s or women’s race is not important.
We had one news reporter covering our whole remit on Sunday. Because the race organisers decided to have the women’s race finish after the men’s on the same day, to get news out on both our one reporter would have been working well into the evening, which wouldn’t have been practical or fair. If the women’s race had have finished in the afternoon, we’d have got a report out on that race, not the men’s. By Monday morning almost everyone who wanted to know Roubaix results would have seen or read about it elsewhere, so there was no benefit to us or the audience posting results on Monday’s blog from either race.
I’d recommend starting a forum topic instead if you have more complaints about our coverage of women’s cycling, because none of the comments here so far are about the article itself which I think is a shame.
Whoa, steady on there Jack! I was disappointed in your coverage of PR femmes because you usually are good at covering women’s racing. Yes most people would know by Monday what the results were, but still a line or two in the live blog wouldn’t have been much effort even if just to acknowledge that the women’s race had happened, you had some good preview articles but anybody reading from Saturday onwards wouldn’t even have known there was a women’s race going on.
From the general reaction there’s been in the comments, that’s clearly not the case.
By Monday morning almost everyone who wanted to know Roubaix results would have seen or read about it elsewhere, so there was no benefit to us or the audience posting results on Monday’s blog from either race.
Yet you dissected the men’s race incredibly thoroughly even though we all knew the result – your arguments don’t wash.
Analysis isn’t the same as reporting on the results. Ryan has dissected the women’s race incredibly thoroughly and was following for the entire day, but because he was the only person out at Roubaix for us the podcast and feature he’s produced are only going up later today – our audio editor wasn’t available to work any faster on it. Ryan could have perhaps produced written content only and got something of less depth out faster, but that wasn’t the brief.
We are reading and listening to the comments, and are considering how we cover future races where there are women’s and men’s races on the same day. Can assure you it simply wasn’t the case that there was some sort of conscious decision by us to cover one race more than the other though.
Jack, is the podcast/feature out yet? I know that you’re not but it almost seems that you’re going out of your way to ignore the women’s Paris-Roubaix.