“Paris-Roubaix is like The Hunger Games" - Lanterne rouge Cyrus Monk on how he resiliently battled to finish the Hell of the North

More than 48 minutes after Mathieu van der Poel took the victory at Paris-Roubaix, Cyrus Monk crossed the line in the Roubaix velodrome to become the final finisher of the race. Despite being outside the time limit on the day, Monk was still able to complete the full 260km route, battling his way through each of the 29 cobbled sectors to reach the finish.

It has been a whirlwind few weeks for the 27-year-old Australian rider in his second season with the Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team, as he has raced in almost all of the cobbled Classics this season and made his Monument debut at the Ronde van Vlaanderen just over a week ago, where he did not finish.

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Speaking to his team after the race, Monk had an interesting comparison for Paris-Roubaix, as he said “I think Roubaix is The Hunger Games. I think everyone at home just wants to watch us suffer, and every sector is like the cannon going off and someone gets killed. For me, that was the first sector, and it was 29 sectors of hell after that”.

On his resilient ride to reach the finish on Sunday, Monk said that “there’s always going to be something that goes wrong, you’re going to have some kind of incident, and I don’t think anybody gets through unscathed, but you have to keep riding”.

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