If Team Sky's Geraint Thomas’ solo victory at E3 Harelbeke has installed him as one of the principal favourites for next weekend’s Tour of Flanders, then his third place finish at Gent-Wevelgem has perhaps provided him with a useful primer in coping with the weight of that tag.
Thomas was one of six strongmen left standing at the end of a combative race that was conditioned by fierce winds, and as they tackled the final approach to Wevelgem, the sextet had more or less punched themselves out. Luca Paolini (Katusha), however, had the lucidity to land one final blow with six kilometres remaining, and it proved to the decisive one.
As the Italian forged clear, Thomas imagined Etixx-QuickStep’s Niki Terpstra and Stijn Vandenbergh might marshal the chase, but he soon realised that his companions were equally keen to place the responsibility on his shoulders. Thomas eventually struck up a working alliance of sorts with Terpstra in the streets of Wevelgem, but it was too little, too late, and he had to settle for third place, 11 seconds down on Paolini.
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“There wasn’t really any collaboration, it was hard to get everyone going and people were obviously looking at me a bit after my win on Friday. That’s what it felt like anyway, but I couldn’t go with everything,” Thomas told Cyclingnews after descending from the podium. “When Paolini went it was a good move for him. We all sort of looked at each other.
“I kind of half expected QuickStep to do a bit more but you know they tried jumping themselves. But fortunately I got away in the end and Niki rode with me and I’ve ended up on the podium. I didn’t have much left at the end, especially just for that sprint.”
Any disappointment Thomas felt at missing out on the win was surely tempered by the fact that he had emerged relatively unscathed from a particularly dangerous day of racing, even by Flemish standards. Strong winds had scattered riders like the buffeted souls in the second circle of Dante’s Inferno as the peloton approached the first climb, the Casselberg, after 120 kilometres, with many fallers.
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