Alastair MacKellar freewheels down the back straight of Roubaix’s outdoor velodrome, unclips his left foot, and stops in front of his EF Education-EasyPost soigneur. The time is almost five o'clock. Half an hour has passed since Wout van Aert whipped the crowd into a frenzy by beating Tadej Pogačar in a sprint, but the atmosphere has since slumped into a lull. There's barely a patter of applause for the Australian.
In fact, most of the fans don’t notice MacKellar’s arrival at all. They've turned instead to face the big screens, squinting against the sunlight to follow the end of the women’s race. With no other riders to welcome him either, all that remains are a few photographers, three EF staff members, and a fistful of empty gel wrappers, peppered across the grass in the track centre.
On the fastest edition of Paris-Roubaix in history, MacKellar missed the 8% time cut by three minutes and 58 seconds. He finished 29 minutes and 19 seconds behind Van Aert, and almost five minutes behind the next best rider.
“It was a pretty mentally challenging day,” MacKellar told road.cc after the race. “I was out the back a fair bit earlier than I would have liked.”
The 24-year-old’s debut woes began on just the third of 30 cobbled sectors. There, some 150km from the finish line, his team leader Kasper Asgreen punctured, and MacKellar dropped back to try and pull him back into contention. Suddenly, he found himself at the back of the race.
“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.’”
More than any other race, there’s a badge of honour that comes with finishing Paris-Roubaix. Riders cross the line every year with a blood and mud dried to their skin, sometimes broken bones too, all for the pride of reaching the outdoor velodrome. Joey Pidcock (Pinarello Q36.5), who got caught behind crashes and finished 53 minutes down last year, perhaps summed up the sense of perseverance best when he said: “I had to finish. it didn’t matter how long it took. I thought it would be dark by the time I got here."
MacKellar felt that same doggedness on Sunday. After the Arenberg Forest, home of the most jagged and bone-rattling cobbles of the 258km route, the rest of the road felt like smooth marble. His goal to tick off one more sector became two, then three, and though he knew he was far from the pack, the fans willed him on to Roubaix.
“I had no idea what to expect,” he said. “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.”
By the time MacKellar reached the velodrome, the commentator’s voice on the tannoy had given way to hip hop music, played as filler before the women’s race arrived.
The Australian had ridden most of 150km by himself. In doing so, he also collected another Monument feather for his cap, having only raced Milan-San Remo before. This one, he explained, brought “mixed emotions”.
“I’m the last rider and no one ever wants to come last in a bike race,” MacKellar said. “I guess now I know I can finish it, which is a nice thing.”
