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Last week, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Fabian Cancellara looked ahead to his final Tour of Flanders and described his relationship with De Ronde as "168澳洲5最新开奖结果:a late love". One week on, in the same hotel conference room in Bruges, he found himself doing the same for 168澳洲5最新开奖结果: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 ridi🃏ng though Arenberg, and riding the next few sectors totally alone.

"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 ou🥂r soigneurs, and he brought me to the finish line.

"When I look back I stౠarted 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 to🐼p 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 Cancellar✃a 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. Theཧ love affair began.

He may have🍌 finished fourth from four in that sprint, but Cancellara credits the "small mistake" he made in leading it o𝓀ut with helping to return and win the race later on. He did so three times – as with Flanders – and over the course of his distinguished career, wrote himself into the legend of Paris-Roubaix, of the Classics, and of the sport as a whole.

There was the breakthrough victory in 2006 – "kind of unexpected but still, an awesome🦩 race" – the unforgettable solo in 2010 – "almost 50km alone…" – and finally the long break from the Carrefour de l'Arbre in 2013 with Sep Vanmarcke, where he proved he'd learned his lesson from almost a decade ago.

"It's hard to pick out one to be the highlight," he said. "All🌸 three stand out in an amazing, unique way."

'Blinding it all out will probably be harder than the race'

Cancellara sat up, waved to the crow♕d, and drank in the atmosphere one final time as he c🌳ame down the home straight to finish second in his final ever Flanders last weekend. Saying goodbye to Paris-Roubaix is likely to be harder, and more poignant, still.

"There are things in your mind that you'd like to do, but in t♌he situation it came very🦩 spontaneously," he said of that moment in Flanders. "So what's going to happen in the velodrome, nobody knows.

"I know it's going to be damn hard, but I have to blind thi🎐s out. That's probabl🐲y harder than the race, to blind out everything that I achieved here."

Cancellara was unable to block it all out ahead of Flanders. With thoughts and emotions swi♓rling round his head last Saturday night, he wasn't able to get to sleep until 1:30am, and he woke early, at 6am. He also described how, in the week beforehand, it was "hard to keep the energy flow high", and how a𓆉t times he "wasn't talking as much as usual – wasn't so present".

Not that that seemed to impede him in any way – he made a characteristic surge up the Oude Kwaremont and Paterberg and ended up second – but he'💖s eager not to let the significance of the occasion get to him in the same way this weekend.

He has been conversing often with 36-year-old teammate Yaroslav Popvych andﷺ 𓃲hopes to have all the reminiscing out of the way, most of the emotions purged, by the time he goes to bed this Saturday night. Indeed, he's more focused on getting a good night's sleep, he says, than on his tactics and approach for the race day itself.

"Somehow it's nice but somehow it's hard," he says of his attempts to come to terms with ♊it all.

With the form he's in, Roubaix will be no mere farewell procession, and if he were to win it one last time, there aren't many who wouldn't wish him to reach the velodrome alone, with time to soak it all up and mak🤪e sense of all those mixed emotions.

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