Cycling star Tadej Pogačar will drive the notorious cobblestone classic Paris-Roubaix for the first time. This was announced by the world champion’s UAE team.
Accordingly, the Slovenian will leave both the E3 Prize on Friday and Gent-Wevelgem on Sunday to concentrate on the Flanders Tour on April 6th and the “Hell of the North” a week later.
A victory in Roubaix would be the penultimate piece of the puzzle on Pogacar’s hunt for the five monuments of cycling. Three of these races-Flanders, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Lombardy tour-has already won the 26-year-old. At Milan-Sanremo he failed again last Saturday. So far, only the Belgian Eddy Merckx, Rik Van Looy and Roger de Vlaeminck have won all five monuments at least once.
Team against participation of Pogacar
For a long time, Pogacar’s participation in Paris-Roubaix has been a secret. The three -time winner of the Tour de France trained in the region a few weeks ago and drove in the notorious forest of Arenberg, but the team leadership was always against participation.
Moritz Cassalette, Sportschau Tourfunk, 24.03.2025 10:27 a.m.
In Roubaix, she sees a great risk of falling and thus a risk to the most important season goal, the victory at the Tour de France. Topographically, the 259 -kilometer race in the Roubaix Velodrom is not particularly demanding. However, around 55 kilometers take place on cobblestones, the drivers and material demand everything.