Tudor Pro Cycling Confirm Paris-Roubaix Debut Squad: Trentin and Hirschi Lead the Cancellara Project Into the Hell of the North for the First Time
Tudor Pro Cycling have confirmed the seven riders who will line up for the Swiss team's first ever Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, with veteran Italian Matteo Trentin and 2020 Flèche Wallonne winner Marc Hirschi nominated as joint leaders of a squad whose every story line, both on and off the bike, leads back to one man: three-time Roubaix winner and team co-owner Fabian Cancellara. Trentin and Hirschi will be joined by Marco Haller, Alex Aranburu, Yannis Voisard, Roland Thalmann and 21-year-old Swiss neo-pro Fabian Weiss as Tudor become the seventh wildcard team in the 123rd edition's start sheet.
For Cancellara himself, who launched the project in 2022 with the explicit five-year goal of taking a Swiss-licensed team back to the Roubaix velodrome where he won three of his four Hell of the North titles, Sunday is the moment the entire enterprise has been building towards. "I have been waiting for this Sunday for four years," Cancellara said at the team's pre-race presentation in Lille on Wednesday, openly emotional and surrounded by the trio of cobblestones he won between 2006 and 2013. "I have raced this race ten times and I have won it three times. I know exactly what it takes to be in the front group at Carrefour de l'Arbre. I have spent the last 18 months teaching the riders in this team everything I know. Now they go and write their own chapter."
Trentin's nomination as one of two co-leaders is the most obvious selection on the page. The 36-year-old Italian's eight previous Hell of the North starts have produced four top-tens including a fifth place in 2018, and his return to Tudor in the winter on a one-year deal was framed at the time by Cancellara as the cobbled-classics piece the team had been missing. Trentin spent ten days on the actual sectors in late March and finished a hugely encouraging eighth at Dwars door Vlaanderen on the final dress rehearsal weekend. "I am 36 years old and Roubaix still does something to me that no other race does," Trentin said in Lille. "I owe Fabian one good ride here. I would like to give him that on Sunday."
Hirschi is the more intriguing of the two co-leaders. The 2020 Flèche Wallonne winner has never finished a Paris-Roubaix and openly admitted at the start of his career that the race did not interest him — a position that began to shift the moment Cancellara recruited him from UAE Team Emirates in late 2024 with a personal pitch built almost entirely around the Hell of the North. "Marc has spent more time on these cobbles in the last twelve months than in his entire previous career," Cancellara said. "He came to me in January and said 'I am ready'. I believe him." Hirschi has produced two top-twenties on the cobbled Classics this spring — sixteenth at E3 and twentieth at Flanders — and Cancellara himself believes the 27-year-old Swiss is on the cusp of producing the kind of long-range attack from 50 kilometres that has been Roubaix's defining tactical signature in the Van der Poel era.
The supporting cast is rounded out by an unmistakably Swiss-Iberian core. Haller, the 34-year-old Austrian who joined from Bahrain Victorious in the winter, brings ten Roubaix starts and the kind of road-captain experience Trentin and Hirschi will need in the chaos of the first ten sectors. Aranburu, the 30-year-old Spanish puncheur, has been a revelation in the cobbled Classics this spring and is given a full attacking free role from Trouée d'Arenberg onwards. Voisard and Thalmann, the two Swiss veterans, will lead Trentin into Arenberg and then sacrifice themselves; Weiss, the 21-year-old neo-pro and reigning Swiss under-23 road champion, earns a fairy-tale Monument debut after a winter in which Cancellara himself drove to Bern to personally hand him his contract.
The symbolism of Tudor's debut is hard to overstate. It is the first time a Swiss-licensed team has lined up at Paris-Roubaix since the dissolution of IAM Cycling in 2016, and the first time a team founded by a Roubaix winner has started the Hell of the North since the CSC-era project of Bjarne Riis. Cancellara has gone to extraordinary lengths to make the moment land: the team will travel to Compiègne in a custom-built Tudor-branded bus carrying the three cobblestones from his 2006, 2010 and 2013 wins, and every rider on the squad has been given a personal handwritten note from Cancellara to be opened in the bus on Sunday morning.
Whether Tudor produce a result on Sunday matters less, in the final analysis, than whether they belong — whether a team built from the ground up by one of the great cobbled riders of the modern era can take its place on a start line where, not so long ago, only WorldTour superpowers and their wildcard satellites were welcome. Cancellara himself has no doubt where the line should be drawn. "I do not need a top-ten on Sunday for this to be a success," he said quietly in Lille. "I need a Tudor rider to still be in the front group when the race goes onto the cobbles of Carrefour de l'Arbre. If we have one rider there at four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, this team has arrived. Everything else is a bonus."