In what he estimated was the longest ride – let alone race – of his young career, Matthew Brennan rewarded Visma-Lease a Bike yet again for a late call-up on Sunday at Paris-Roubaix. The youngest rider at the start line in Compiègne, and indeed the only teenager, Brennan went deep into the race in a group of chasers before he was dropped.
He ultimately finished down in 44th, nearly nine minutes behind race winner Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck), but anyone who watched him race, be they fans or his Visma team leader Wout van Aert, will know that Brennan made a statement with his ride.
"To be in the position that I was in, when you're left with 20 guys and you look around and they're the best guys in the peloton, then you kind of think maybe you've done something right up until that point," Brennan said afterward. "After that, unfortunately, the parachutes came out a little bit and unfortunately I couldn't continue at the pace they were going, but that's part of the game. [I am] still young, which, to be in that position is really quite a confidence booster for the future."
Sunday’s race was just the latest chapter in what has been a remarkable season for Brennan, who started the 2025 campaign expecting occasional starts in mid-tier races to ease him into WorldTour peloton. After the 19-year-old Brit turned heads with a victory at the 1.Pro-rated GP Denain, however, Visma slotted him into the roster at the Volta a Catalunya, where he immediately turned even more heads with a stage win on the opening day of the race, and then took another on stage 5 for good measure.
Having acquitted himself so well in those early tests, Brennan was called into the Roubaix squad. Visma clearly had and has high hopes for him, though he was sure to point out before the start that the team avoided putting too much on his shoulders.
"There's no expectation really," he said in Compiègne. "I've come into this race really young, unexpectedly I turned up here, so they're not expecting a lot from me, but they believe that I can do a lot in this bike race, to really support the team and get really far."
As he pointed out then, races today often reach a crescendo with 100 km still to go, and it turned out that he was very much still in the mix on Sunday as Van der Poel and Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) began trading blows in the second half of the race. Brennan said later that Van Aert then told him he could ride for himself, but he did eventually start to fade.
Still, that Brennan was able to navigate the Trouée d'Arenberg so cannily and survive so long beside veterans with many more years of experience speaks volumes to well-roundedness at such a young age. Bike handling, racecraft, and pure power were all required for Brennan to perform the way he did on Sunday. It's rare for a 19-year-old to show any of those at a WorldTour level, let alone all three.
Did we do a good job with this story?
