Sensing that the Belgian press might be about to fill a Tom Boonen-sized void in their classics coverage with copious helpings of Tiesj Benoot, Lotto Soudal has this week adopted a strategy similar to the one employed by Manchester United when Ryan Giggs first burst onto the scene in the early 1990s.
For three days in the wake of his fifth-place finish at the Tour of Flanders, the 21-year-old was strictly off limits. All media requests were politely declined, as Benoot recuperated quietly at home in his parents' house in Drongen on the outskirts of Ghent, not far from the Eddy Merckx velodrome.
A man dubbed hopefully as a new Boonen cannot stay under wraps for the entirety of the sacred week that links the Ronde to Paris-Roubaix, of course, and Benoot returned before the microphones and cameras near Bruges on Thursday afternoon.
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Last year the attendance at Lotto’s press conference before the classics was small enough for all the reporters present to squeeze onto the team bus with plenty of room to spare. This time around, they were sufficient in number to warrant a conference room inside the Van der Valk hotel. The Benoot effect, perhaps, though a timid question about the increase in his female following post-Ronde aside, the hysteria was mercifully nowhere the levels faced by a young Boonen.
“I had a lot of requests but I didn’t talk to the press for the past three days and that’s helped to calm things down a bit,” Benoot told Cyclingnews after the main conference, where he had spoken with a calm confidence not at all common among professional cyclists of such tender years. “I’m obviously just very happy with what I did on Sunday and since then I’ve had a lot of rest. Yesterday I did an individual recon of the Roubaix course and today I did one with the team.”
Benoot makes his Paris-Roubaix debut on Sunday as part of a Lotto Soudal team eager to be as aggressive as it was at the Tour of Flanders. Ahead of the Ronde, Benoot was assigned the very precise task of going on the offensive after the Taaienberg, but his role for Paris-Roubaix is less specific. The idea is simply to be present deep into the finale, and his teammate Roelandts looked to downplay expectations by saying it would be tougher for Benoot to do so than it had been in Flanders. “If you have a bad moment in Roubaix, you can’t recover,” Roelandts warned.
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