This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 142

It’s the 27th of February 2016 and Mathew Hayman is being helped into the back of an ambulance during the closing stages of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. He doesn’t know it yet, but he has sustained a fracture in the radial head, the top part of his forearm that connects with his elbow. His Classics campaign appears to be over before it has even begun and a career-long dream of climbing onto the podium at Paris-Roubaix is placed on the shelf for another year. At 37, perhaps it’s time to forget about that dream altogether. 

Paris-Roubaix is no ordinary race for Hayman, it’s a race that over the years has wedged itself under his skin. It’s an obsession formed over more than a decade-and-a-half of attempting to win the world’s toughest bike race. Now his chance has disappeared for another year.

Nonetheless, Hayman gets back to training as soon as possible, setting up an indoor training studio in his garage, his arm entirely encased in plaster and resting on an old ladder for up to 20 hours per week. Is he in denial, trying to ignore the disappointment of a missed Classics season? Or is this just the natural response of a professional cyclist? 

“You just lose your identity when you're a bike rider and you're not riding. Like, what are you?” Hayman reflects a decade on. “I don't know why I was so committed to that. My advice to someone else would be to shut it down and rebuild for the next goal. It wasn't a sane thing to do, to start sitting on the home trainer for 20 hours a week.” However, this one irrational decision would unlock a series of events which would define his career. 

There’s no race like Roubaix

Hayman’s affair with Paris-Roubaix began 16 years earlier, when he competed in the first Hell of the North of a new millenium. Johan Museeuw powered away solo to claim his second of three cobblestone trophies and Hayman completed the race – no small feat – second-last, almost 20 minutes behind the great Belgian. The Australian, originally from the Sydney suburb of Camperdown, admits that he didn't immediately fall in love with the race, especially after being exposed to horror stories from his more experienced Rabobank teammates in the build-up and going through his first recon.

“They're telling you it'll be okay and everything will be alright. And then they're telling you: ‘Remember when that guy broke his leg? Remember when that happened? It’s so hard, you won't feel your hands for a week.’ So it's a bit of both. I was just terrified,” Hayman recalls. “It’s probably the worst thing ever for any rider to do a recon at Roubaix. Doing 60k of cobbles is just not enjoyable when you're not doing it at race pace, not with race wheels, not with the crowd there. You just think it’s not even possible.” 

Paris-Roubaix is a unique challenge. Bones rattle, fingers blister, minds curse these diabolical agricultural tracks through northern France. Simultaneously, for those who get the bug, there’s a euphoria that overwhelms the negatives as riders struggle over the cobblestones, roared on by the masses through hallowed landmarks which carry the memories of more than a century. For some, nothing compares to Paris-Roubaix.

“There's only one Roubaix in the year. There's no other race that's similar to Roubaix,” says Servais Knaven, winner in 2001, one of the race’s muddiest editions, who now leads the fleet of Shimano neutral service vehicles. “It is also the whole history of the race. It is one of the classics that If I look back from the first time I did it until now, there's not been many changes on the course. And the old showers – you go back in time a bit. When I come back to do the recon, it always gives a special feeling.”

For Hayman, it wasn’t just the sense of history that drew him to the race, it was also the feeling of overcoming the immense challenge that Roubaix presents. It is an accomplishment just to finish the race, and he did so in all of his 17 participations – although he finished outside of the time-limit in 2002, he recalls with a hint of bitterness. “It's a bloody challenge. It was frustrating, but that was what I loved about it… It was very much under my skin. My mum used to fly over from Australia to watch it. I used to get so worked up about it. My wife was there that day, she'd barely come to a bike race in my whole career. They knew what it meant to me.”

Hayman’s moment

Hayman’s weeks on the turbo trainer in his garage seem to have done wonders for his fitness and the arm appears to be healing well too. With a couple of weeks to go before Roubaix, Hayman breathes fresh air as he returns to training on the road. Now he’s got one thing on his mind – to make the squad for Paris-Roubaix. He wants to race. The squad for Flanders is full and too much of a risk on his barely-healed arm. He travels to Spain the weekend before Roubaix and impresses in two one-day races. He’s made it onto the squad. 

Hayman’s experience of the Paris-Roubaix recon in 2016 couldn’t have been more different from his debut. As opposed to his team-mates who have completed a full Classics campaign, battered and bruised, he couldn’t be fresher. “We did a big recon and I just had diamonds in my legs,” he says. “We had a motorbike taking the guys so they could get a bit of speed between the sectors and I was just sitting off the back, doing it all in the wind by myself because I just felt so good. I also didn't have that pressure that I put on myself, because I was just coming in as a bit of an extra, so things just kind of aligned.” 

Luke Durbridge was one of Hayman’s team-mates in 2016 and remembers a difference in his more experienced colleague all year, having joined Hayman on an altitude training camp in South Africa ahead of the Classics. “This was his year. He was training like an absolute man possessed. Then he crashed and then he recovered in a way, probably absorbed all that overtraining he was doing… He literally came in with zero pressure, he didn’t think he was prepared for it,” Durbridge remembers.

It’s race day. With the unknown of Hayman’s form and how his arm would hold up against the thrashing of the cobblestones to come, his role is to support the team’s leaders – Durbridge and Belgian Jens Keukeleire – while covering breakaway moves in the early stages. “Hayman comes up to me when we first started the race, 30k in, and he took his arm warmers off and said ‘I'm going to go in the break now. Do you mind holding these?’ 

‘Sure. You were actually working for me. But, yeah, all good. I'll take the arm warmers,’” says Durbridge. Hayman gets across to a promising move. He’s at the front of the race.

Then come the first few sectors of cobbles; Troisvilles á Inchy, Haveluy á Wallers, Trouée d’Arenberg. The radio crackles with activity, but without clarity. Something is happening behind. Hayman doesn’t know it, but Tom Boonen, the pre-eminent Classics rider of his generation, is attacking and brings a group across to the lead. Soon after, Boonen and others accelerate again. Hayman hesitates. “It was always in my head that the wheels are going to fall off soon. I've just been training on the turbo. There was a little element psychologically that I was protecting myself too… I could see them moving and I kind of went back to some of the sports psychology that I've done in the past and it was like, I've got to give it a try.” 

He makes it into a final group of five to challenge for glory in the velodrome. Hayman, Boonen, Sep Vanmarcke and others attempt to break the elastic in the closing minutes, but it all comes down to a five-way sprint in cycling’s most famous arena. Forty-three days after the despondency in the back of that Belgian ambulance, now Hayman experiences the delirium of his dream fulfilled as he strikes first and fastest to cross the line as the winner of the 114th edition of Paris-Roubaix. 

He remembers that there was “a lot of emotion” in the minutes and hours that followed, to the point of overwhelm. Durbridge is the first teammate to congratulate him: “My radio wasn't working but then once I'd realised he won I dumped the bike and just ran, jumped over the barricades. It was absolute fairytale stuff.” 

As if to remind everyone that the farm tracks of northern France are not Disneyland, the team experiences the night and day of Roubaix in synchronicity. While Hayman was surging to the front earlier in the day, Mitch Docker suffered a horror crash in the Trouée d’Arenberg and is in hospital. While celebrating Hayman’s win, the squad are also awaiting good news about Docker, which eventually comes through. There is no wild afterparty that evening, everyone is too exhausted for that, just a meal with family and colleagues in Ghent. Hayman spends several weeks buying champagne for anyone who will drink it to stretch out the celebrations. And ever since, he has worn the label of Paris-Roubaix winner with pride.

A new era

Three years after his win Hayman retired from racing, immediately climbing into the car as a director sportif with the team now known as Jayco-AlUla. He thinks the race has changed immeasurably in the decade that has followed on from his success: “It's faster, it just doesn't stop, it opens so early, less chance for guys to come back. Guys are having punctures early on and never see the race again.” It’s a similar story across most races in the past few years, with bikes getting faster, investment in aerodynamics and improvement in nutrition, but the impact is keenly felt in Roubaix. “I think anything post-Covid, you've really got to put a blanket over it,” Durbridge thinks. “Covid onwards, cycling completely changed. New people came in, the new stars of this generation came in as well. It's mental. It is like a different race.” 

The introduction of tubeless tyres has also reduced the chance of punctures, but Knaven also believes that they have widened the field of contenders, contributing to allowing lighter riders to contend by reducing the tendency to “bump” on the cobbles. “It was always that lighter riders cannot ride the cobbles or win Roubaix. For sure, tubeless tyres helped Pogačar to be up there. I’m not saying it's only that because he's the best rider in the peloton, but it’s nice to see nowadays that weight is less of an issue and someone who has won the Tour de France four times is also able to compete.”

So with the race getting faster and more controlled, and the dominance of Mathieu van der Poel paired with the desire of Pogačar to add another monument to his collection, is an underdog win like Hayman’s still possible at Paris-Roubaix? Knaven believes it could happen, but it’s much less likely. “It’s a little bit more a race for the favourites now because the favourites start racing earlier than in the past and they could underestimate the guys in the front thinking we will catch them. Now, the breakaway never gets a lot of advantage.”

Hayman agrees, but hopes that the gods of Roubaix will continue to look fondly on those less-expected to feature every once in a while. “My motto, and [Canadian ex-rider] Mark Walters had always said, ‘always keep riding’, you can keep coming back in Roubaix, and that used to be the case. But I feel like now, you can ride all you want, but when they're doing 50k an hour everywhere, it's pretty hard to come back into the race. I’d like to think there could still be some really strong guys popping up in the top-ten that you probably didn't have on your list a week out and then you look at them in Roubaix and go actually, he's a bloody good bike rider. He's found a race that suits him. Maybe we can have another surprise winner of Roubaix.”

Despite the way the face has evolved and the emergence of Van der Poel and Pogačar, Hayman still believes the nature of the race that defined his career hasn’t changed, and neither has he as a result of winning it. His cobblestone is out on display at home, but not front and centre, its view hindered by a newer collection of his children’s gymnastics trophies. “The way I got there was about resilience, and that's everything I stand for – being hard and just getting on with it. At the end of the day, you're exactly the same person. You still have kids at home. I'm still bottom of the rung in my house.”