Omega Pharma-Quickstep’s Tom Boonen continued his amazing comeback with his ninth win of the year, and it was a huge win in a huge race: Boonen won the 2012 Paris-Roubaix cycling race by 1:39, a huge margin. He is only the second rider in the race’s 117-year history to win the race four times.
Boonen attacked 53 km from the finish and rode the final hour-and-a-quarter of the race alone. He could have stayed with the leaders until the final few hundred meters and won with his powerful sprint; instead he put on a display of power and toughness which no one else could come close to matching.
“Today was one of my best days in my career,” Boonen told cyclingnews.com.
“I was not really thinking about the winning the race or matching the record. I was just fighting myself. I was taking it step by step, cobblestone by cobblestone, kilometer by kilometer. If you start a race like this and think about the whole distance then you make it harder than it is. Riding this way not something I often do but today was a perfect day to take some risk.”
“I was really thinking about my lead. With the gap at 30 seconds I was trying to take it second by second. I was trying not to push it right away to one minute, tried not to force myself. It was the best way to save my strength and put all my strength into the 50 km in front of me. I think it was the best option.”
Domination might be an overused word in sports reporting, but at times it is the only fitting description: Tom Boonen dropped the best riders in the world with seeming ease. He didn’t even leave them in his dust; the dust had settled by the time the competition arrived. The 31-year-old Belgian was a kilometer ahead of the closest pursuit when he entered the Roubaix velodrome to take his last laps and the trophy. He could have gotten off his bike and walked, and still won.
The entire peloton knew, for the final five kilometers, that they were racing for second; they probably knew 20 km from the finish, when the big Belgian had a gap of over a minute, that the race was Boonen’s.
Paris-Roubaix is one of the toughest of the One-Day Classics because of the cobblestones: 27 sections of two-hundred year-old farm roads paved with brick-sized blocks, with huge gaps between them. The pounding the bike and rider takes over the cobbles is immense, staggering; the bikes buck into the air, and the riders’ bodies ripple from the shock of each cobble.
Crashes, flats, and mechanical failures are common; the winner needs luck as well as strength to succeed. Boonen had good luck, but his strength on this day was phenomenal.
