"Tom was a true winner": Matthew Hayman applauds Boonen's classiness despite painful defeat at the 2016 Roubaix

The 2016 edition of Paris-Roubaix might've had the most iconic finish in the 120-year-long history of this one-day race. The main protagonists at that time were four-time champion Tom Boonen and, relatively unknown, Matthew Hayman. The 37-year-old Australian has done Roubaix fourteen times prior with two top-ten results standing out in Hayman's palmares. Yet, against the best Classics rider of his generation, at the end of a 6-hour race, Hayman found some hidden strengths deep down in his reservoir and outsprinted Boonen to take a stunning victory that would become a marking point of his career.

As unlikely as his Roubaix win seemed, the run-in to the race has been even less straightforward that the cobbles of La Trouée d'Arenberg. A month and a half earlier, at the end of February, Hayman had suffered a heavy fall in the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. With a broken elbow, his spring season was ruined, or so everyone thought.

"I was told it would take 6 weeks before I could ride a bike again," Hayman shares his story with Sporza 10 years after his stunt. "I thought everything was ruined."

With a recovery period of 6 weeks, you know it will be difficult to be fit at the start of Paris-Roubaix. Let alone compete for the win. But Hayman shows his teeth. Just a few days after his crash, Hayman is back on the rollers, putting in the necessary work to be ready for Roubaix, the race that infatuated him.

With his elbow in plaster, Hayman had to get rather creative with his bike setup. The Australian would hold his handlebars with left hand while resting the right on a ladder. "I was in a cast up to my upper arm. I rested that arm on a kind of ladder, and that way I could train."

"For the first 3 weeks, I trained almost 20 hours a week on the rollers. At first, I thought to myself: 'What am I doing?' It wasn't easy," said Hayman about a period when a platform like Zwift wasn't yet so well-established. "I found training on the rollers absolutely terrible and couldn't last an hour back then, but now it started to work [thanks to the likes of Zwift]."

Hayman killed time watching footage of the classics. "I did two sessions almost every day. I trained in the morning, and in the afternoon, I watched the race in my garage while training."

This outlined setup was hardly comfortable, but a dedicated man can go far for his dream... and this injury proved nothing more than a stepping stone to Hayman's later success. "It was my favorite race. I mean: I did everything I could to be able to return there. That was the race where I thought I could get a result."

On the morning of the race, Hayman jumped into an early breakaway and later hung on when race favourite Tom Boonen made a bridge to the group. Thus the race ended in a five-way sprint with Boonen, Hayman, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Sep Vanmarcke and Ian Stannard. Exclusive company. And Hayman somehow found the most of them all in his legs to bring home the cobble trophy.

And, in the process, Hayman broke the hearts of all Belgian fans as a theoretical fifth Roubaix title of Boonen would make him the first rider to ever achieve this feat.

Hayman tries not to add fuel to the fire. "I know that I did an interview with Sporza, in Dutch quite quickly, because I feared that otherwise my house would catch fire," he laughs shakily.

"I am a big fan of Tom myself. Tom was a true winner. After the finish, he immediately shook my hand. He thought it was fair," Hayman appreciates his opponent's. "Yes, his congratulations were certainly nice. I don't know if I could have reacted the same way in the reverse situation. Tom is a great champion."

Even now, Hayman is still full of praise for his competitor from back then. "People say you need a lot of luck to win Roubaix, but look at Tom's palmares. He was there every year. Then you're not talking about luck."