Boonen of Arabia

Compare and contrast pan flat highways, as smooth as billiard tables, with vicious bergs, laced with bone-jarring cobbles. Searing, relentless heat, with sub-zero temperatures. Desert winds with blinding rain.

There’s no reason why Omega Pharma-QuickStep’s Tom Boonen, widely regarded as the best cobbled Classics rider of his generation, and arguably the best of all time, should be so ruthlessly effective in the Qatari desert (there is a delicious irony at Boonen suffering broken wheels from a pothole in a desert highway after comprehensively mastering the pave of Flanders and Roubaix).

That Boonen ‘owns’ the Qatari national tour is beyond question. To a certain extent, it matters little if his team-mate Niki Terpstra claims overall victory in the 2014 edition. Boonen controlled matters behind Terpstra’s breakaway group on stage one, and on stage two claimed victory for himself. There is no question who is the strongest rider in the race.

The manner of Boonen’s victory was telling: a victory accomplished with such ease that he was asked why he had bothered to sprint all the way to the finish line. This hardman of the cobbles is not without humour, however. A narrow defeat to the none-hungrier Mark Cavendish at the 2011 Schelderprijs when victory had looked equally certain had taught him the importance of pedaling to the line, Boonen smiled. His rivals in Qatar will be glad if he stops pedalling completely.