It’s the question American George Hincapie has had to answer over and over again in the days leading up to Sunday’s 104th Paris-Roubaix: How do you beat Tom Boonen?

"We just have to have as many guys as we can, for as long as we can, and make Quick Step work and not give them a free ride," Hincapie said of his Discovery Channel team’s simple strategy.

Hincapie knows what it feels like to come close to winning the Queen of the Classics — his second-place finish to Boonen at last year’s Paris-Roubaix was his top result in a string of five top-10 finishes in five attempts — but he still yearns to win his favorite one-day event.

Boonen, the Quick Step-Innergetic star who won his second straight Tour of Flanders last Sunday, and is attempting to repeat the repeat with another Paris-Roubaix victory this Sunday, is the heavy favorite for the 259km race from the city of Compiègne, about an hour’s drive north of Paris, to the velodrome in Roubaix.

Boonen once rode in support of Hincapie at Paris-Roubaix, when the two were teammates on U.S. Postal, but a lot has changed for the 25-year-old Belgian over the past four years. Last Sunday he deflected Discovery Channel’s blows at Flanders with a two-up sprint win over fellow Belgian Leif Hoste to become the first man since Eddy Merckx to win Flanders while wearing the world champion’s jersey. Hincapie and Hoste were in a small group that included Boonen and several of his Quick Step teammates when Hoste launched an impromptu attack 32km from the line. Boonen simply followed Hoste, then outsprinted the Discovery Channel rider for the win.

Hincapie says he liked the style of the Flanders race, which was exceptionally hard on a cold and windy day. The pace and the conditions caused the majority of the field to pack it in early, but this time Hincapie says Discovery will have to be a little smarter.

"We just have to try to talk more if we have [Hoste and me] still there near the end," he said. "Maybe we’ll have [Vladimir] Gusev in the front, also."

Another hard day of racing will be fine with Hincapie. "I do like the style of race that Flanders was," he said. "It was really only the strong guys that were up there. The race was so hard, and then Quick Step really laid it down, so it was just a select group of 15 guys. I much prefer that style of racing — you know who to watch, whereas with 55, 60 guys, it’s tough."

One thing that’s sure to make Sunday’s race hard is the return of the legendary Arenberg Forest section of cobblestones. The 2.4km section of treacherous pavé was removed from last year’s race while it underwent repairs. The Trouée d'Arenberg (or Trench of Arenberg), comes at the 163.5km mark this year, when there are just under 100km left in the race. The repairs in the forest were to fix a water-runoff problem, but even though it may drain better and it’s 187 inches wider, the Arenberg section won’t be a cakewalk.

As it is with the Tour of Flanders, the first 100km of Paris-Roubaix are fairly sedate (unless it rains, which is a possibility on Sunday). Riders follow paved roads north until the first section of pavé in Troisville at the 98km mark. That’s followed by 26 more cobblestone sections over the next 160km (numbered in decreasing order, from 27 to 1). This year’s route includes a total of 52.7km of pavé.

Many of the teams scouted the pavé sections on Friday, when the cobblestones were dry as a bone. Rain is possible on Sunday, however, and while it was dry near the start in Compiègne, rainshowers moved into the north on Saturday afternoon.

Key pavé sections to watch will be Arenberg (section 17 at 163.5km), Mons-en-Pévèle (section 10, at 210.5km) and Le Carrefour de l'Arbre (section 4, at 242km).

One rider who knows the roads well is Hincapie’s teammate Hoste. Born and raised in Kortrijk, Belgium, just north of Roubaix, across the France-Belgium border, Hoste was pleased with his second-place finish to Boonen last Sunday, but says he’s focused on the team doing one better.

"Second is nice, but only winning counts," Hoste said. "We’re going to try again Sunday."

And to repeat that question, how to beat Boonen?

"I just hope I’m not alone with him this time," Hoste said. "I hope George, and maybe also some other guys, are there to try and lose him. Alone, it’s almost impossible, I think, to beat him. Even more at Roubaix than at Flanders."