Paris-Roubaix has always had a habit of making fools of perfectly good road bikes. Riders can turn up with the fastest, lightest, most wind-cheating machine in the world, and within a few sectors, feel like they have brought a toothpick to a demolition site.
From a tech perspective, the most revealing thing about the race isn’t perhaps who wins – though chapeau to Wout van Aert and Franziska Koch – but how the peloton bends the rules of what a road bike is allowed to be in order to survive it.
