Fabian cancels Boonen

Helplessness. It’s a situation where there’s nothing you can do but pray for divine intervention.

I guess that’s what Tom Boonen felt when his breakaway companion, Fabian Cancellara, dropped him like he was standing still on the Geraardsbergen, a short, steep hill 15km from the finish of the Tour of Flanders the Belgian Classic two Sundays ago. Boonen, who looked so strong earlier, looked like a beaten man at that instant. The incredible thing was that unlike Boonen, Cancellara didn’t even bothered to accelerate violently when he attacked. He just sat down on his saddle and applied the maximum horsepower he had from his massive legs. After that, it was, “bye-bye, Tom”!

It was eerily similar to the E3 Prijs Vlaanderen, a race that happened a few weeks earlier, when going into a tight corner in the last K, Cancellara sneaked an attack and immediately distanced Boonen and breakaway companion Juan Antonio Flecha by a hundred meters. Tried as they might, both chasers simply could not overhaul Cancellara.

To put this all in perspective, Boonen is 29yo, and still the best classic rider and sprinter of this generation. Winner of Flanders twice, Paris-Roubaix thrice and the sprinters jersey in the Tour de France, Boonen was expected to win again this year. Cancellara, on the other hand, is a year younger but has a wider range of abilities than the specialist in Boonen. He has won Paris-Roubaix, Milan-San Remo and was the World Champion in the ITT thrice. The main difference between the two is that Boonen comes from a country that treats cycling as religion and cyclists as demi-gods. Therefore he is expected to win. Cancellara is Swiss and to say that he feels the pressure is like saying that Roger Federer gets nervous in a Wimbledon Final.

Now, the question is, can Boonen come back from the psychological beating he got from Cancellara? Place your bets!

1st- Cancellara (SUI), 2nd- Boonen (BEL), 3rd- Philippe Gilbert (BEL)

PARIS-ROUBAIX Today

The 2010 P-R is 259km long, 53km of it in ancient cobblestones and it’ll take the winner about six and a half hours on the saddle. Most riders don’t like to race it but all wants to win it, if you don’t mind the contradiction. For some riders, the rough road leaves a blistered hand or temporary form of arthritis for a few weeks. That’s why it’s not the baddest race in the cycling calendar for nothing.

Most riders prefer a custom bicycle made set-up for this one day spectacle. And for the manufacturers, there is no better lab to showcase their products and they happily spend a fortune developing a one-off rig.

In the 90’s, a front suspension was the rage after Greg Lemond’s teammate won back-to-back with it. But when framebuilder Ernesto Colnago insisted on using straight carbon forks instead of suspension and put three Colnago riders in the podium in P-R ‘96, suspension forks went back to MTB’s.

However, P-R could be cruel for some framebuilders. In 2006, George Hincapie, Lance Armstrong’s loyal teammate and a perennial favorite in P-R, broke the steerer tube of his fork to the embarrassment of TREK, the same company that supplied Lance all of his 7 Tour winning bicycles.

Boonen’s team, Quickstep, will have their final chance of turning the tables against their rivals during this weekends Paris-Roubaix. If Tom wins P-R, everything will be forgotten. If he loses to Cancellara again, he knows that there will be hell to pay. Somehow, I don’t think Boonen will allow it to happen. - THE FREEMAN