Roubaix (France) (AFP) - Mathieu van der Poel won cycling’s Paris-Roubaix for a third straight time on Sunday, edging Tour de France champion Tadej Pogacar in the race nick-named ‘The Hell of the North’.

At the line, Dutch rider Van der Poel jumped from his bike and hoisted it aloft, roaring at the packed ranks of fans in the Roubaix velodrome.

Van der Poel became the first rider since Italy’s Francesco Moser in 1980 to win three consecutive editions of Paris-Roubaix.

“It means a lot. I was really suffering,” said Van der Poel after hugging his friend and rival Pogacar.

“When he made that mistake in the corner, I had to go for it,” he said of the key move.

He described Pogacar as “one of the best riders ever”, but added he had seen Pogacar was going too fast into the tight, narrow corner.

It was in some ways a moral victory for Grand Tour specialist Pogacar, unsuited to the bone-shaking 259km course where he was pitted against the physically larger specialists.

Dane Mads Pedersen was third in a three-way sprint for the final podium slot, with Belgian Wout van Aert fourth.

Once cycling’s toughest race had been whittled down to the two stars, Pogacar took a cobbled corner too fast, flying into fencing, falling off and losing his chain.

“I was following a motorbike and didn’t see the corner until too late,” said the Slovenian, who hailed the winner.

“There’s no excuses. If I was a kid, he (Van der Poel) would be my idol.

After dusting himself down, the plucky 26-year-old was 20 seconds off the pace and 30-year-old Van der Poel had a definitive upper hand.

“My brake was rubbing and it got into my mind and I cracked,” said Pogacar.

Van der Poel had told reporters he was off form before putting in a sublime performance without a single error.

He led the 175 contenders for ‘The Queen of the Classics’ out of Compiegne for a 259.2km charge toward the Roubaix velodrome under low grey skies.

Ahead of them was the challenge that makes this race so feared, 30 cobbled sections rated between 1-5 stars each, depending on their state of disrepair and difficulty.

Bone dry, with billowing clouds of dust during Saturday’s women’s race, overnight showers rendered the notorious rough-hewn roads slippery in the longer men’s event.

- A remote and windy mining path -

Pogacar rode in the front ten riders of the race from the flag and it was a series of attacks by him that broke the race open.

“I had to go for it because I couldn’t ride into the velodrome with those two,” he said of Van der Poel and his teammate Jasper Philipsen.

On a remote and windy mining path in the middle of sodden fields along the Franco-Belgian border, Pogacar made his first trademark acceleration more than 100km from Roubaix’s finish line.

Three or four attempts later, he dropped the others. Dark horse Pedersen punctured, ruining his chances of winning, while Van der Poel and Philipsen both soon caught the Slovenian maverick.

Clearly downhearted, the Dane cursed his fortune.

“If you hit a stone wrong you get a puncture. I’m unlucky. I was feeling really good, everything went really well until that moment,” said Pedersen, the 2019 world champion.

Van Aert started poorly, entering an opening cobbled section towards the back of the peloton and emerging two minutes behind.

The wiry all-rounder Pogacar won the Tour, Giro d’Italia and world championships in 2024, while Van der Poel, who is 10 kilos heavier, is the most powerful one-day racer, and has multiple mountain bike and cyclocross titles.

Both men now have eight wins in the long one-day races known as Monuments.

“I’ll see you at the Tour de France,” Pogacar said defiantly as he staggered back to his team bus.

Van der Poel for his part revealed he’d been hit in the face by a water bottle.

“It was two thirds full and felt like a stone hitting me in the face,” said the Dutchman.

He also bemoaned how the cobbles felt in the closing section.

“When you’re fast enough you fly over the cobbles, but at the end I felt like I was hitting every stone.”

He did, however, get to hoist one of those cobbles – the winner’s trophy – for a third year after writing a small piece of cycling history with his hat-trick of wins.