Lotto-Intermarché Confirm Paris-Roubaix Squad: De Lie Leads Belgian Redemption Bid With Rex, Van Gils and Girmay in Support
Lotto-Intermarché have confirmed the seven-rider squad that will line up for the 123rd Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, with Arnaud De Lie leading a merged Belgian-backed line-up that general manager Stéphane Heulot has openly described as "the most important Roubaix start this team has ever had". De Lie will be flanked by Laurenz Rex, Maxim Van Gils, Biniam Girmay, Jasper De Buyst, Cedric Beullens and Belgian under-23 road champion Milan Fretin in a seven-man unit built around a single, simple instruction: get the 23-year-old to the finale with every option still on the table.
It is an announcement the team and its fans have been waiting weeks to make. After De Lie was forced out of the Tour of Flanders for the second consecutive year with the bronchitis that has run through the Belgian spring, his Roubaix participation was in genuine doubt as recently as Saturday. The fact that he has been named as squad leader on an unchanged start sheet — and will travel to the Compiègne roll-out in the team's leader's car alongside Heulot himself — is the clearest possible signal that the medical staff have cleared him without reservation. "He has done two full five-hour days on the cobbles this week and the numbers are where we want them to be," Heulot said on Wednesday. "Arnaud is ready."
The supporting cast is arguably the strongest cobbled group the merged squad has ever assembled. Rex, the team's 2024 signing from Intermarché-Wanty, is one of only four riders on the start sheet with a top-ten at both Paris-Roubaix and Flanders, and his free role on Sunday effectively gives the team a second captain if De Lie is distanced before the Carrefour de l'Arbre. Van Gils, a revelation on the 2026 opening weekend with fifth at Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne and twelfth at E3, will shepherd the leader through the chaos of the first four sectors and is expected to be the last Lotto-Intermarché rider with De Lie when the race explodes.
Girmay's inclusion is a genuine surprise. The Eritrean had been expected to skip the cobbles entirely this year after a back-and-shoulder complaint forced him to abandon Gent-Wevelgem, but Lotto-Intermarché confirmed on Wednesday that he has come through a full five-hour session on the cobbles without issue and will start as the team's designated fast man for any sprint from a reduced group. "Biniam's signals have been green since Monday," said sports director Frederik Willems. "If this race comes back together at Roubaix-Hem — and there are scenarios where it does — we suddenly have a rider in the finale who can beat almost anyone in a small bunch gallop."
The pragmatic selection is completed by De Buyst, Beullens and Fretin — three riders whose job description Heulot summarised in a single line: "Keep Arnaud out of the wind for 200 kilometres, then get him into the front group at the Trouée d'Arenberg." De Buyst, who will retire at the end of the 2026 season, makes what is expected to be his final Roubaix start; Beullens, a long-time De Lie roommate, brings lead-out experience from three previous editions; and Fretin — 21 years old, Belgian U23 road champion and the youngest rider on the start sheet — earns a dream first-year Monument debut on the back of a sparkling spring that has already produced a breakthrough top-fifteen at Dwars door Vlaanderen.
For De Lie personally, the stakes are impossible to overstate. A rider once marketed by the team's previous management as the heir to Tom Boonen has had a cobbled Classics career so far defined almost entirely by misfortune — illness, crashes, crashes caused by the illnesses of others, and now a second consecutive winter wrecked by respiratory infection. Sunday is the one race in the calendar where the sheer horsepower he possesses could, on a good day, eclipse all of that baggage. "I want to race Roubaix without thinking about what has happened to me," De Lie said in Kortrijk on Wednesday. "Just race. I know I have lost weeks of work but I also know that at Paris-Roubaix you do not need the legs of March — you need the head of April. And my head is where it needs to be."
The line between redemption and another cruel chapter is as thin as the tubulars Lotto-Intermarché will glue on in Compiègne on Sunday morning. But for the first time in over a month, the team arrives at a Monument with its leader on the start sheet, his numbers trending upwards, and the full cobbled weight of a Belgian merger project behind him. On a weekend when so much of the peloton will be watching Pogačar, Van der Poel and Van Aert, it is Arnaud De Lie who could yet write the most unexpected line of the 123rd Hell of the North.