Last week, Fabian Cancellara looked ahead to his final Tour of Flanders and described his relationship with De Ronde as "a late love". One week on, in the same hotel conference room in Bruges, he found himself doing the same for Paris-Roubaix. It's a race that was much quicker to bring success, but it was far from love at first sight.
"The cobbles just beat me," he says, looking back on his first ever Roubaix, back in 2003 when he was a fresh-faced, unprepared 22-year-old.
"I was in Fassa Bortolo, I don't think I had a lot of experience before that; I just went into the race. If I'm not wrong I had an early puncture. I don't remember everything, just that I was alone, one of the last riders riding though Arenberg, and riding the next few sectors totally alone.
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"I had only enemies during that ride. I looked back, I saw I the broom wagon, then I saw the feed zone, the cars moving away and finally I got in the car with one of our soigneurs, and he brought me to the finish line.
"When I look back I started with the wrong mentality for this race. I remember really well, at one point Andrea Tafi was behind me, really at the back, so when I saw how he moved up and finished top 10, I learned you can never give up in this race. You need not only the power in the legs, it's a mental race; you can't give up."
Fast forward a year, and Cancellara was riding into the iconic Roubaix velodrome as part of a lead group of four – well clear of the esteemed chasing duo of Johan Museeuw and Peter van Petegem – and ready to fight for the win. The love affair began.
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