"The First Time I Will Stand In The Velodrome Again": Sonny Colbrelli Returns To Paris-Roubaix Five Years After The Night That Ended His Career
Sonny Colbrelli is coming home to Roubaix. ASO confirmed on Thursday morning that the 2021 Paris-Roubaix champion — the last rider to win the Hell of the North in a bunch-ending sprint on the velodrome track, and the last rider to win it in the rain — will attend Sunday's race as an official ambassador and guest of the organisers. It will be Colbrelli's first visit to the Roubaix velodrome since the wet October afternoon he crawled across the line and threw himself to the concrete in tears beside his bike, trying to understand what he had just done.
The five-year gap is not incidental. Colbrelli's professional career ended abruptly in March 2022 at the Volta a Catalunya, where he suffered a cardiac event at the finish of stage 1 and was fitted with a cardiac defibrillator. Italian medical rules around defibrillators made a return to professional racing legally impossible; after a painful eighteen-month public process and a failed challenge to the rules, the Italian retired from competitive cycling in August 2023. He has kept a conspicuously low profile in the sport since, appearing only rarely and almost never at the races he once won.
The choice of Roubaix, and not one of the many other races he could have come back to, is not an accident either. Colbrelli's 2021 victory is arguably the greatest single-day Monument result by an Italian rider in the last two decades. He outsprinted Florian Vermeersch — then a 22-year-old neo-pro on the now-defunct Lotto Soudal squad, and now a UAE Team Emirates-XRG protected card under Pogačar on Sunday — and Mathieu van der Poel in a three-man finish that had been settled by one of the hardest Roubaixes in living memory. That Vermeersch, five years later, remains at the centre of the 2026 story is a detail that has not been lost on anyone in the team paddock this week.
Colbrelli himself spoke to RAI Sport on Thursday in a short interview from Brescia. "It is the first time I will stand in the velodrome again," he said. "I have not been back since that day. There are parts of that race I still do not remember. There are parts I remember very well. Paris-Roubaix gave me the biggest day of my life and then I had to stop because of a different, unrelated thing, and I have always been at peace that those two things were separate. But I have not, until now, been ready to go back to the place." He declined to say whether he had watched any of the 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025 editions of the race live on television.
ASO's plan for Sunday is straightforward: Colbrelli will be presented to the velodrome crowd between the women's finish on Saturday afternoon and the men's race the following day, will ride part of the course on Sunday morning in a parade convoy before the race caravan moves through, and will watch the men's finish from the podium area with Tom Boonen, Fabian Cancellara and Roger De Vlaeminck as part of an expanded former-champions guest line. Organiser Thierry Gouvenou's only published comment on the move was a single sentence on X: "This race has needed Sonny back. Sonny has decided he is ready."
There is a broader cultural point sitting underneath this story. Colbrelli's return coincides with the end of the so-called "quiet era" between his 2021 win and the 2022-2025 Van der Poel era — a four-year run in which no non-Dutch rider has won the men's race, no Italian has come close, and the shape of the sport's hard-man image has tilted decisively away from the riders whose careers Colbrelli's generation were inspired by. The return of an Italian former champion to the Sunday velodrome during the first weekend of the Pogačar-Van der Poel-Van Aert-Ganna super-era is, if you look closely enough, a quiet torch-pass between two different cycling cultures.
For the fans who have been buying cobble-inspired Cycling Mugs and drawing up their Roubaix predictions all week, Sunday just gained an extra narrative layer that none of them had factored in 48 hours ago. For the race itself, it is a quieter, more dignified piece of stagecraft than ASO usually manages. And for Sonny Colbrelli, it is the long walk back to the place that gave him his greatest day — five years to the week after the last time he stood on the concrete bank of the Roubaix velodrome.
It has been five years. It will be the first time. It will not, if the crowd has anything to say about it, be a quiet welcome.