Disheartened Vos immediately retreats backstage following 4th place finish in Paris-Roubaix: "Cursing isn't in her nature"

Fourth in Paris-Roubaix, that is presumably not what Marianne Vos had in mind when she lined up to start the race on Saturday afternoon. The Dutch lead rider of Visma | Lease a Bike immediately disappeared backstage after the finish line, but gave a reaction a little later on - as did team director Jan Boven.

Let's revisit those final few hundred meters of Paris-Roubaix. Vos and Elisa Balsamo - the Lidl-Trek rider who eventually finished second - started their sprints roughly at the same time, but in the end, it was Lotte Kopecky who, coming in third, managed to claim the cobblestone with a powerful surge. "The other side of the track had headwind," said the Belgian afterwards.

Vos immediately told team director Boven after the finish that she had made a mistake and turned right off the Roubaix track upon arrival: direction team bus. "She is our lead rider, someone who wants to win races. Losing is not an option for her. So now, there's a bit of disappointment, or rather, a lot of disappointment. It takes a while for that to sink in or settle for Marianne, but then she can also quickly make an analysis. I know her by now, and that stays with her. What does she say? That she did something wrong, but cursing is not in her nature. I've never heard her do that. That mistake she refers to is perhaps going for it too soon."

Vos herself confirmed that. "I'm disappointed, terribly so. There's another chance next year, but then you have to wait another 365 days. That's a pity," said the rider who so dearly wanted to win Roubaix. "In the end, I was simply beaten, but when you start out aiming for victory, it really sucks when you don’t even get to leave a mark. I took the inside curve, but just didn't have enough speed left. Kopecky came around very fast from the outside, and I stalled.’

Were Kopecky's recent track experiences decisive, then? "No," concluded the winner. "All the other leading ladies have that experience too." At Visma | Lease a Bike, they also believed that this was not directly a factor. "But Marianne didn't have an advantage there. Lotte's is very recent, and for Marianne, it would be around 1988 (laughing, ed.), so that's just not comparable. I still had good hope. We had coached her about who was behind, but we left the sprint to her. After all, she is the one who has won 250 times," Boven correctly states.

Visma | Lease a Bike was very strong, but SD Worx-Protime and Lidl-Trek had upper hand

Visma | Lease a Bike nevertheless rode a very strong race, with Sophie Von Berswordt prominently at the front. "The plan was for me to control things a bit, but that also gives you an overview on the sectors. So, I rode at my own pace without making the race too hard," said the domestique. Vos was also satisfied with the work of her teammates. "We rode a good race. We were at the front with the entire team and stayed out of trouble the whole time, tackling the cobblestone sectors well. Racing like this is very nice."

Boven agreed but saw that Lidl-Trek and SD Worx-Protime had the mental upper hand in the final. "We were also a bit trapped, with Ellen van Dijk and Balsamo upfront and Lotte who could still aim for Lorena Wiebes. That made the game a bit harder than we had hoped. It was our best race of the spring, but also a race we had been looking forward to for a long time."

"The fact that she won the Omloop and Dwars door Vlaanderen, two races she hadn't won before, did give us confidence that she could compete for the podium here. In the end, you have to say that a lot of things went well, but not everything," Boven told IDLProCycling.com, among others. "The final 400 meters are the most important in the race, but at that point, we saw Lotte was really stronger. Marianne had to start from far back, but Lotte also still had a lot of power left."

"We were going for the win," confirms Von Berswordt. "Marianne is very disappointed, I think. This was really a main goal for her, and she really wanted to try to win, so it stings that it didn't work out. But that's sports." The final report is left to team director Boven: "Disappointment now prevails because what we really wanted didn't happen. But there is also a certain pride in how we prepared leading up to this and how we went down fighting."