A maddening business, the World Championships. Tom Boonen's Belgium, as anticipated beforehand, made all of the running, and still Peter Sagan (Slovakia) carried off the spoils. Boonen had to settle for third place in the reduced group sprint that decided the title, but it was scant consolation on his final appearance in his national team's famous blue jersey.
"I'm disappointed, but in the end a bronze medal is better than fourth place," Boonen said of placing behind Sagan and Mark Cavendish (Great Britain), though he didn't seem especially convinced of the fact. "In the end, we've brought something away from this Worlds."
Years of racing and winning at the Tour of Qatar had taught Boonen that it doesn't take a lot of wind to make a very big difference in this corner of the Gulf, and so a right-hand turn on a nondescript section of desert road, some 180 kilometres from home, became a sort of preliminary finish line.
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Belgium led into the crucial point, and, seemingly on Boonen's command, hell, or a form of it, was unleashed. The peloton was scattered into echelons and when the sifting process was completed, there were some six Belgian riders in the front group of 26, while the threat posed by Germany had been remorselessly excised, with André Greipel, Marcel Kittel and John Degenkolb all missing out.
"We took our responsibility today and we did what we planned. We made the race hard from kilometre 75 to 135," Boonen said of a manoeuvre that some quarters of the Belgian press had labelled as 'Operation Desert Storm' in the build-up to the race.
The mission, of course, was far from accomplished, with sprinters of the calibre of Sagan, Mark Cavendish (Great Britain), Alexander Kristoff (Norway) and Michael Matthews (Australia) all safely aboard this high speed train. Belgium had an ally of circumstance in Italy's quartet in the move, but the uninspiring finishing circuit yielded little chance of whittling down the front group any further.
Double Dutch
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