On the third iteration of Paris-Roubaix Femmes, SD-Worx Protime managed to finish the Lidl-Trek dominance and safe their first victory, due to their celebrity world champion, Lotte Kopecky.
The Belgian gained the dash from a small group of six after 148.5 km and lined 17 cobbled sectors earlier than the well-known lap and a half of the velodrome. She pipped the previous world champion, Elisa Balsamo, who completed second; while the rising British teenager Pfeiffer Georgi got here third.
The full overview of the day’s occasions – together with Kopecky’s mid-race mechanical – may be present in our wonderful race report written by our race group, however right here we will give attention to the bikes. At the top of Paris-Roubaix, the organisers kindly prop the bikes up on a makeshift podium contained in the velodrome and depart them for tech nerds like us to rise up shut with, take photos of, and usually simply gawp at.
Naturally, the successful bike of Lotte Kopecky is the one we care about most; the share of actual property her bike has been given on this article is proof of that, however all three bikes right here have simply podiumed on the hardest one-day stage race within the calendar, so we additionally discovered it attention-grabbing to check the differing method every group has taken with their tools alternative.
Kopecky raced and gained on the Specialized Tarmac SL8 S Works, while Balsamo rode Trek’s Domane mannequin. Third-placed Pfeiffer Georgi was aboard the Scott Foil. Interestingly, there have been three totally different genres of highway bike on the rostrum. An all-rounder, an endurance bike, and an out-and-out aero bike which we study under.
As we predicted in our tech predictions, after which had confirmed by Specialized a couple of days later, Kopecky opted for the S-Works Tarmac SL8, notably shunning the Roubaix for its namesake race regardless of that bike having gained the race 7 occasions in its 20-year historical past. The Tarmac is an all-rounder race bike; putting a best-of-both-worlds steadiness between light-weight and aero.
Meanwhile, 2nd place Balsamo was on the Domane, Trek’s endurance-focussed bike, with its wider tyre clearance and bump-smoothing Isospeed Decoupler know-how. With that mentioned, it was the ‘RSL’ (Race Shop Limited) model which bears extra aggressive geometry akin to a race bike than the Domane SLR 9 I reviewed in 2023.
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In third place, Pfeiffer Georgi was on the Scott Foil, a motorbike that provides little question about its aero credentials with its deep profiled tubes and one-piece cockpit.
Up shut with Lotte Kopecky’s Paris-Roubaix-winning bike