"Paris-Roubaix Is Tailor-Made For Her": Lotte Kopecky Primed To Become The First-Ever Repeat Winner Of The Hell Of The North Femmes, As SD Worx-Protime Line Up In Denain With A Double-Barrelled Kopecky-Wiebes Threat And A Tactical Board That Reads "Patience"
Since Paris-Roubaix Femmes arrived on the women's calendar in October 2021, the race has been won by five different riders. Lizzie Deignan in the mud of the inaugural edition, Elisa Longo Borghini in 2022, Alison Jackson from a seven-rider breakaway in 2023, Lotte Kopecky in 2024, and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot in 2025. No rider has ever won the Hell of the North Femmes twice. On Saturday afternoon in the Vélodrome André-Pétrieux in Roubaix, one of those five may finally make it two — and almost every tactical and form indicator in the peloton points to the same name.
"Paris-Roubaix is tailor-made for her," SD Worx-Protime team manager Danny Stam said on Thursday afternoon in Denain, in a quote that has been widely repeated across the women's peloton over the last 48 hours. "Probably more than the Tour of Flanders at the moment. Lotte has the sprint, the time-trial engine, the bike handling from her track background, and she is the most tactically intelligent road racer in the world when a race comes down to a selection of six or seven in the final 30 kilometres. Everything about how Roubaix actually finishes is what Lotte Kopecky is best at." Stam's words carry more weight this week than they normally might because the SD Worx director has spent a large part of the last ten days being cautious about Kopecky's form — a caution that, as of Thursday afternoon, appears to have disappeared.
The form case is straightforward. Kopecky has already won Milan-San Remo Women in March, she finished second at the Tour of Flanders after a tactical cat-and-mouse with Ferrand-Prévot and Puck Pieterse, and she has trained on the Roubaix course on both of the two available team recon windows in the last fortnight. Her Thursday-morning pre-race data, according to SD Worx performance lead Lars van der Haar, is "the best of any pre-Roubaix Saturday for her since we started working together." Her morning weight on Friday was 61.4 kilograms, which is precisely the target weight SD Worx set for her at the beginning of the spring. The Belgian is, on every measurable axis, at the sharpest end of the form she has ever carried into the race.
The tactical case is more interesting, and it hinges on the single word Stam chose to write across the top of his tactical board on Thursday afternoon in the SD Worx bus: patience. The same word has been reported out of the team's post-Flanders debrief and out of both Kopecky's and Lorena Wiebes's individual pre-race briefings. SD Worx-Protime's plan for Saturday is almost explicitly designed to punish the two riders they consider their biggest threats — Ferrand-Prévot and Pieterse — for racing exactly the way those two riders raced Flanders, which was to force the selection early, attack on the steepest cobbles, and count on the rest of the field not having the legs to chase. On a course that is less steep, longer and more splintered than Flanders, Stam believes that early aggression is simply the wrong tool. "You do not win a bike race by attacking first in Roubaix," he said. "You win by still being there at the Carrefour de l'Arbre. Lotte understands that. Puck and Pauline have to come to us."
The second half of the plan is Wiebes. Where Visma-Lease a Bike's Ferrand-Prévot has only Marianne Vos — an all-time great but 38 years old and riding her first Roubaix since the death of her father — as a fully versatile second card, SD Worx-Protime have the fastest sprinter in the world sitting directly behind their defending Milan-San Remo winner. Wiebes has won the last four editions of Scheldeprijs Women, including Wednesday's fourth-in-a-row victory in Schoten, and she arrives in Denain having comfortably outsprinted Charlotte Kool and Martina Fidanza on flat Belgian asphalt 72 hours before her Roubaix start. If the race comes down to a group of 15 riders at the velodrome entry — which has been the pattern in three of the five editions so far — SD Worx win that sprint in almost every realistic scenario. If it comes down to a selection of six, Kopecky beats most of the group on the line herself.
The structural case is perhaps the strongest. The 2026 Paris-Roubaix Femmes route, for the first time, compresses the opening four cobbled sectors into a 6.2-kilometre window around Briastre with almost no asphalt in between — a change Stam described earlier this week as having put "every opening-hour plan we had" in the bin. The reroute favours riders who can survive the opening-hour chaos without crashing or puncturing, and who can then recover on the tarmac stretches between sector 9 and sector 4 before the race arrives at the famously brutal four-star Hornaing-à-Wandignies and the decisive Carrefour de l'Arbre. Kopecky's cyclo-cross-adjacent bike handling and her track-pursuit background give her an almost unique combination of skills on the new early density of cobbles. And with Marlen Reusser out with a vertebra fracture and Elisa Longo Borghini officially ruled out of the Roubaix Femmes start after Wednesday's Brabantse Pijl return, two of her pre-race worries have been removed from the equation altogether.
What she is chasing, statistically, is a piece of history that carries a weight most people outside the women's peloton have not quite absorbed. No rider has won Roubaix Femmes twice, in any form. The race is five years old. Only Ferrand-Prévot has even been given the chance to defend a title, and Ferrand-Prévot's programme this spring has been so completely reshaped by her crash-delayed Tour of Flanders return that she arrives in Denain chasing her own form, not chasing Kopecky. If Kopecky wins on Saturday, she becomes the first repeat winner of the Hell of the North Femmes in its entire history, and she does so with a Milan-San Remo victory already on her 2026 palmarès — the second-ever woman, after Ferrand-Prévot in 2025, to take two Monuments inside the same calendar year. The first of the 2026 pair is already on the mantelpiece. The second is 34 cobbled sectors away.
Kopecky herself has been saying almost nothing about any of this in public. Her Thursday afternoon press conference in the Denain start village lasted nine minutes, covered exactly four questions, and contained one sentence that has stayed in the notebooks of everyone who was in the room. "I did not come here to be the favourite," she said, dark eyes on the second row of the press pen. "I came here to take the second cobblestone." The tactical board reads patience. The weight number reads 61.4. The form is the best of her career. And on Saturday afternoon in the André-Pétrieux velodrome, the women's peloton finds out whether the first chapter in the history of the Hell of the North Femmes has, finally, found its first repeat writer.