Paris-Roubaix 2026 Sunday Morning Two Hours Out: Pogačar Signs On First, The Buses Arrive In Compiègne In A Carefully Staggered Eight-Minute Sequence, And Matej Mohorič Steps Off A Eurocopter For Sonny Colbrelli's 08:40 Lap
09:25 Sunday morning on the Place du Général de Gaulle in Compiègne. Two hours exactly from the 11:25 départ réel of the 123rd Paris-Roubaix. Tadej Pogačar is first off the UAE Team Emirates-XRG bus at 09:17 and first onto the sign-on stage at 09:19, riding the twelve metres between the bus steps and the podium barrier without clipping in. He takes the pen held out by ASO's Thierry Gouvenou, signs his name in the empty top-left square of the official signature sheet, holds up a hand for the single photograph he will consent to before he races, and is back on the bus by 09:21. It is the quickest sign-on of Pogačar's three-year professional-Monument career. "I have been ready since Thursday," he had said at the Thursday evening safety briefing. "I did not need this morning to feel any different." It did not feel any different.
Mathieu van der Poel's sign-on followed at 09:33. The three-time champion rode the 40 metres from the Alpecin-Deceuninck bus at the Avenue Octave Butin with Jasper Philipsen, Gianni Vermeersch and Silvan Dillier in formation behind him, took the step onto the podium without dismounting, signed the sheet, and was back on the bus within seventy-eight seconds. It is the copy-paste Sunday morning he has run on each of the last three winning editions, timed this year to the same second as in 2025. Wout van Aert arrived at 09:41, rode the same 40-metre approach from the Visma-Lease a Bike bus, signed without smiling, and walked back into the bus without turning to acknowledge the 700-strong crowd around the podium barriers. "Wout this morning is exactly the Wout we want," Visma DS Maarten Wynants told the Belgian broadcast pool at 09:46. "We do not need him to wave."
The story of the Sunday morning is, however, not on the sign-on stage. It is eight kilometres north-east of Compiègne, on a quiet stretch of the D332, where Matej Mohorič — winner of Friday's Itzulia Basque Country Stage 5 in Eibar — steps off a Eurocopter AS350 at 07:52, walks ninety metres to a waiting Bahrain Victorious team car, and is helped into a Bahrain skinsuit in the back of the car between 07:55 and 08:03. The overnight helicopter transfer from Eibar had gone to plan: wheels up at 21:10 Friday evening, Beauvais landing at 02:40 Saturday, five hours in a Beauvais airport hotel room, then the final 45-minute hop across the Oise at 07:05 Sunday. Mohorič — his first Paris-Roubaix of a three-year period since the fatal crash he witnessed has been the unspoken subject of every Bahrain team meeting of the spring — rode the 25 kilometres of Sonny Colbrelli's informal pre-race lap from 08:40 to 09:48 at the front of a fourteen-strong group. At 09:48, he rolled directly from the end of Colbrelli's lap onto the Bahrain Victorious team bus in Compiègne, put on his race skinsuit, and was signed on by Thierry Gouvenou personally at 10:02.
Colbrelli's lap itself, the most anticipated informal event of the weekend, ran for exactly sixty-eight minutes with fifteen riders in attendance — the six surviving members of the 2021 Bahrain Victorious squad plus Colbrelli, plus Mohorič, plus five invitees from the current peloton including Van der Poel's domestique Silvan Dillier and Pogačar's Tim Wellens. Wellens was the only UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider on the lap and rode at the back of the group for its entire duration. At the exact 09:00 midpoint, Colbrelli led the group through a single-file passage over the Carrefour de l'Arbre sector — the only cobbled kilometres any of the fifteen riders will ride before the race itself — and stopped for the now-familiar informal thirty-second tribute at the spot where he had collapsed during the 2021 post-race podium ceremony. The tribute was unfilmed at Colbrelli's specific request.
The 04:30 Sunday morning ECMWF weather refresh, delivered directly to every team performance director's phone by the ASO meteorology office, held the 6% precipitation probability that Saturday evening's 20:30 run had locked in. Temperature at départ: 11°C. Temperature at the Mons-en-Pévèle crossing at the 15:30 ETA: 17°C. Wind: south-south-east, 9 to 12 km/h, a tailwind through the closing Carrefour de l'Arbre. The 03:30 pre-dawn rain risk that had briefly flickered back into the Sunday morning forecast at 22:00 Saturday had cleared by the Sunday 00:15 run. The forecast is now, in the phrase Thierry Gouvenou used on Friday afternoon, "the dry Roubaix every rider said he wanted when he was asked in January." It is the first dry Roubaix of the decade and only the fifth of the century.
The tyre pressures confirmed at the Saturday 18:30 meetings have held through the Sunday morning. Mads Pedersen will race on 4.0 bar front and 4.15 bar rear — the softest front-tyre pressure of any Paris-Roubaix favourite in the post-tubeless era. Jonathan Milan, on his Paris-Roubaix debut, will race on 4.15 bar front and 4.25 bar rear. Van der Poel's numbers are identical to his 2025 winning ride: 4.1 bar front, 4.25 bar rear. Pogačar's final-hour softening to 4.15 bar front and 4.25 bar rear — made by UAE's Javier Sola specifically in response to Saturday's 20:30 tailwind forecast — remains in place. Van Aert's pressures, Visma's closest-guarded secret of the week, were leaked at 09:15 by a Visma mechanic to a French photographer and are being reported as 4.2 bar front and 4.3 bar rear: the hardest of any of the six main favourites.
The start-area atmosphere between 09:30 and 10:15 was described by the veteran Belgian broadcast commentator Renaat Schotte, working his twenty-second consecutive Paris-Roubaix, as "the least nervous start-village I have ever stood in." The new forty-eight-hour media lockdown and its Saturday-evening lift have, in Schotte's reading, "given every rider exactly three hours of public exposure on the Sunday morning and exactly no public exposure on the Saturday. The peloton has never looked more rested." The final on-camera quote of the morning came from Pogačar himself, caught by Eurosport France's Sébastien Piquet as the Slovenian walked from the UAE bus to the rolling-start line at 10:58: "I have ridden this race zero times. I am about to ride it once. If it is the only time, I will still be the luckiest cyclist in history." The 123rd Paris-Roubaix rolls out of Compiègne at 11:25.