One More Lap

“18 years as a professional, over a thousand days racing under my belt, and yet there was one day's racing I'd never completed - Paris-Roubaix. In my final year, 2014, it was one of my primary objectives, to finish that is. 257 km, 28 cobbled sections totalling nearly 60 km, and two laps of a velodrome. I did it all, apart from the last lap. I stood in the middle of that most famous of velodromes, helmet off, knocking back a Fanta, face covered in dirt, feeling a bit of a hero. Until my wife told me I had one more lap to do. ONEMORELAP? That pretty much summed up my final year, it wasn't exactly a blaze of glory. Still, I love that race, and when it came to finding inspiration for new interpretation of our classic base layer there was only one classic worth representing, the Queen of them all.”