Luke Rowe says that his Tour of Flanders crash isn’t going to stop him pulling out all of the stops for this weekend’s Paris-Roubaix. Despite losing a fair amount of skin in Sunday’s tumble, Rowe has been treating this week as business as usual and has been riding through the pain as the team recced the Roubaix route earlier this week.
The Team Sky rider admitted that if it were another point in the calendar he would probably sit back and allow his body the time it needed to recover. With Roubaix just around the corner, however, he’s keen to keep the body moving so that he doesn’t seize up ahead of Sunday.
“I kind of lost most of my skin down most of my right-hand side, but in general when you crash that fast on a bad surface like that it could have been a lot worse,” Rowe told Cyclingnews at the start of Scheldeprijs on Wednesday. “You see Sep’s [Vanmarcke] got a broken finger, and that’s put him out of Roubaix. While you can’t say that it’s lucky, I think that I’ve come off relatively well.
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“Yesterday was quite painful but you’ve just got to keep going. To be honest it’s painful, but I’m just trying to forget about it. It’s Paris-Roubaix. Any other race, you’d say I’ll have a few days off and let the body heal but it’s Roubaix and nothing is going to stop me performing to the best of my ability there.”
Rowe had nowhere to go last Sunday when Vanmarcke crashed with just over 50 kilometres to go. He had been in the key breakaway that had gone on the Muur van Geraardsbergen but his day was done as soon as the accident happened. He was able to remount and make it to the finish, although visibly in a lot of pain.
“It’s just one of those things, I had nowhere to go, and in a blink of an eye, I was down. My bike was broken, and the cars were so far back and in an instant it was game over,” he added. “It’s never nice to stop a Classic, especially Flanders or Roubaix. I’ve never not finished one so far and I didn’t want to start there. It was worth battling on to the finish line, it’s quite a nice feeling and also it’s good to try and loosen up the leg a little bit by riding. I think physically I was in good shape, and it was pretty gutting after being up there in a pretty select group and in a good situation and feeling well, but that’s the Classics.”
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