Greg Van Avermaet (BMC) may not have landed an individual stage at the Tour of Qatar since he won into Mesaieed on just his fifth race day as a professional rider back in 2007, but in the game of shadow boxing that is early-season racing in the Gulf, the softly-spoken Belgian is almost always mentioned in dispatches.
This is the fourth consecutive year that Van Avermaet has chosen to start his season at the Tour of Qatar, and for the fourth time in a row, he appears to have hit the ground running, helping to force the decisive echelon on stage 1 and moving up to fourth overall after a solid showing in Wednesday’s time time trial at Lusail.
“I was hoping that [new race leader and stage winner Edvald] Boasson Hagen would not be so strong and that everyone would stay at the same level so that I could have taken the jersey. It's a little bit disappointing but it's only the start of the season,” Van Avermaet said afterwards.
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At the start village at Qatar University the previous day, Van Avermaet told Cyclingnews that he had would follow his usual Classics build-up – the Tour of Oman, Belgium’s Opening Weekend and Tirreno-Adriatico will follow – and that, at 30 years of age, he had seen little point in experimenting with a different approach to his training in the off-season.
“At this stage in my career, I try to do always a bit the same and it seems to work out for me,” Van Avermaet said. “I didn’t do anything special, I’ve just tried to build a good base over the winter and hopefully I will be there over the whole year.”
What Van Avermaet will hope to change, of course, is his luck in the Classics, where he has built up a reputation as a nearly-man – always present in the photograph, but never its subject.
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