The
Canyon//SRAM Racing rider had to battle to stay in contention in the second group, which was chasing down the lead group of six riders as they approached the finish. On how she raced in the finale, Bäckstedt went on to say “it's Roubaix, if you're trying to fight for top-20, you never give up on that so you've got to just go as hard as you can and just try to get there”.
The difficulty of Paris-Roubaix can never be understated, as the Welsh rider said that “my hands were completely ruined from basically the first sector so towards the end I was really struggling with holding on and then just trying to dig as deep as I can. After 120-130km of cobbles, your legs are dead and your body is dead. So it was really just a case of trying to hold on for as long as possible and digging in”.