SD Worx may have dominated the spring Classics season from late February onwards, with five major wins across four riders, but the Dutch squad's command of the cobbles came apart on a chaotic Saturday afternoon in Paris-Roubaix Femmes avec Zwift.
After wins at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Strade Bianche, the Ronde van Drenthe, Gent-Wevelgem, and the Tour of Flanders, few would have predicted a best placing of seventh for the powerhouse squad.
But after almost four hours of racing across the cobbles of northern France, Lotte Kopecky leading home the chase group behind the early breakaway was the best they would end up with.
The large escape group that would eventually contest the win on the Roubaix velodrome looked at one point as though they would be brought back before the finish, only for a major pile-up in the favourites group 37km out to change the complexion of the race.
"I think we were going pretty well towards the breakaway but then this happened. But it's also bike racing…" Kopecky, who went down with teammate Lorena Wiebes as well as defending champion Elisa Longo Borghini (Trek-Segafredo) and several other favourites, reflected after crossing the line.
"It was also that one-by-one our team was taken out by punctures so that wasn't so nice. But then when I came into the group with Lorena, she really emptied herself completely to try to bring us as close as possible. And then we had a very strong Femke in the break.
"It was a very – how should I say – animated Paris-Roubaix."
The break of the day – which eventually saw 18 riders coalesce together out front after around 15km of racing – would eventually be whittled down to six for the finish.
By the first sector of cobbles at Hornaing, the group already enjoyed a six-minute advantage over the peloton. It was a yawning gap, but even so, Kopecky and SD Worx were confident that they would bring things back together later on.
"The group had quite a big advantage so I think the pace we were doing was just not hard enough to change something in the race," Kopecky said. "We saw also last edition that it was OK to start racing early so that's what we tried to do."
But that crash, coming on the three-star Pont-Thibault after Longo Borghini lost control at the head of the group, had earlier almost put Kopecky – the number one favourite at the start of the day – out of the race.
"It was I think the worst timing in the race to have that crash," she said. "It was actually a pretty hard one because I really hurt myself there. I just stayed down and thought I couldn't go anymore.
"But then the mechanic came, and he was like 'you want to try?' and I tried and in the end I'm happy that I did."
To summarise her day, Kopecky repeated something about the Hell of the North that many have said in the past – "That's Paris-Roubaix. You can predict nothing."
