‘The lights are on but nobody's home’ – exhausted riders react to the fastest Paris-Roubaix ever

This year’s Paris-Roubaix marked the fastest in the race’s 120-year history, by a long margin. Averaging 47.8 kilometres per hour over the 260km course, winner Mathieu van der Poel completed the race in five hours and 25 minutes, representing a speed that was almost a kilometre per hour faster than in 2023, which was also a record-breaking edition.

In fact, the first 27 finishers all also beat last year’s winning time, which makes the speed even more astounding – even those that were out of the race come the final were going faster than the victorious Van der Poel in 2023.

As a result of the speed, and also the well-known brutal challenge of Roubaix, the riders arrived in the André Pétieux velodrome physically and mentally exhausted, and quite stunned by how hard the race had been from so early on.

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Sam Welsford on course at Paris-Roubaix 2024

“The lights are on but nobody's home, really,” a self-described ‘gassed’ Sam Welsford said of his feeling at the finish.

“Ugh, that was a long race,” he added.

“I had a crash actually quite early and went flying, my knee was pretty sore so I was actually thinking I wouldn’t be able to finish. It came good a bit after I started riding but it was like a big cork in my quad, it was a bit grim. I’m pretty gassed now.”

Only 110 riders finished within the time limit, with the cut-off even tighter at 26 minutes 5 seconds due to Van der Poel’s roaring pace, though another 18 valiantly battled on to finish but not receive official results.

The race was made particularly hard by the fact that Alpecin-Deceuninck put the pace on really early in the day, building tension that caused several early crashes, and forcing riders to battle sooner than they might have anticipated.

Things were whittled down very early, no doubt thanks to the unprecedented speed.

“Every race we're breaking records,” said Fred Wright. “I was looking at my Garmin and I was like 'shit we've got half the race still to go' and there weren't that many guys left.”

Welsford described the breakneck speed in the bunch in the first half of the race, which saw riders either flying at the front or crashing.

“Everyone was jumping and trying to get in the break, there was a bit of blocking going on and a few teams were trying to launch and it made a really tight bunch. We were going through these towns at 60, 70k an hour and you had those little S-bend chicanes, and I think it was just the braking at the front and then a chain reaction to the back [which caused crashes].”

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Tom Pidcock catches his breath at the finish

For Tom Pidcock, who finished 17th – so within those that beat the previous fastest Roubaix speed – the intense day on the cobbles of northern France left him in something of a daze.

“It was good but I don’t know, I don’t have the energy to sum it up right now,” he said tiredly at the finish. “I’ve come around a little bit but it’s like you’re on drugs or something when you finish, the speed of that race.”

On the other side of the coin, some riders had a better day than before in this year’s Roubaix, with the momentum keeping riders going.

“When you have to pull from the beginning, you don't see much of the race. Other years I've watched it in the bus, but this year I felt good enough to continue to Roubaix,” said Tim Declercq, who finished his first Roubaix on Sunday, usually pulling out early after being one of the riders tasked with setting the pace from the start.

Even for those who were in the team making it hard, the effect of such a crazy speed took its toll as they reached the velodrome.

“It was hard, I have cramps everywhere, it’s horrible,” Alpecin-Deceuninck’s Silvan Dillier said.

With average speed records being broken on the regular – all three Monuments in 2024 have been the fastest editions in their respective histories – and the fastest race times seemingly getting shorter and shorter each year, riders will have to adapt to this ever-increasing physical demand.

Even though the scenes at the finish of Roubaix were of exhaustion and physical depletion, there is also a sense of privilege to be racing in this record breaking era, even if it doesn’t feel the best when you’re just turned yourself inside out on the cobbles.

“It's a bit daunting how good he is. But you sort of look at it as special to race someone of that calibre,” Welsford said. “You can really see how they do it in the race and learn from someone like him. He won by like two and a half minutes, we were getting updates on the road. It's pretty special to be in this generation.”

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