For some, lining up at the start of Paris-Roubaix Femmes Avec Zwift comes after specific training and a calculated lead-up; for many others, this past week has been about recovering from the Tour of Flanders, reconning the pavé, and then getting ready to go again.
The firm favourite ahead of the race was current world champion Lotte Kopecky. Off the back of her win at Flanders, she was looking to defend her victory at Roubaix. SD-Worx Protime didn’t have it all their own way. Although Kopecky and Loretta Wiebes gave SD-Worx a strong two-pronged strategy, it ultimately failed to deliver, with the duo settling for third with Wiebes and 12th for Kopecky. Considering the expectations on the shoulders of the team, this result will be hard for the team to process.
Of the women who found themselves at the pointy end of proceedings, Chloé Dygert (Canyon-SRAM Zondacrypto), who finished in a select bunch one minute and six seconds down on the eventual winner Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease A Bike), made her power data available, uploading it to Strava.
Digging into the data tells a story about what it takes to be competitive at The Hell of the North and how this race, more so than Flanders, played to Dygert’s strengths.
The breakaway formation was nothing like Flanders
At the Tour of Flanders, the eight-woman breakaway rolled off the front after only a handful of kilometres. The fight to get there was hardly a contested battle. The difference between this part of the race is partly due to the terrain. At the Tour of Flanders, the cobbled climbs allow teams to reel in a breakaway once on the bergs, knowing that the climbs will sap the energy of the front runners.
At Roubaix, Alison Jackson has proven that getting in the early break can be a golden ticket to the Roubaix Velodrome. The result is that every rider now wants to be in the break, and every team with a favourite carefully polices the break's composition before allowing it to disappear up the road.
Successive attacks in the opening kilometres failed to snap the elastic, with multiple attacks gaining a few seconds before being swallowed by a charging peloton. It was only after around 40 km that a duo established itself at the front. Quinty Ton (LIV-AlUla-Jayco) and Aurela Nerlo (Winspace-Orange-Seal) broke free with around 120 kilometres remaining. This fight to get ahead of the race saw the intensity inside the peloton for the first 30 kilometres far higher than we had seen a week earlier at Flanders.
For Dygert, the opening 30 kilometres show how aggressive the racing was inside the peloton. Holding 3.22 W/kg for the opening 45 minutes is a little higher than the peloton held at the Tour of Flanders, but the delta between raw and normalised values is comparable at roughly 20%. This means that the racing was more intense at Roubaix, with a consistently higher output needed to stay in the bunch.
The fight was on before the first cobblestones appeared on the horizon
With 66 kilometres of racing under their belt, the peloton arrived at the first pavé of the race. As you would expect, the fight for position going into the four-star Hornaing à Wandignies was the stage for the peloton's first clash. After leaving the town of Escaudain, the peloton began to ramp things up for the 4.3-kilometre jostle. For Dygert, this saw her put out some big numbers, considering this was only the first of 17 sectors of pavé.
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