Tag: Tom Boonen

  • Mat Hayman has the biggest balls, apparently

    “Sometimes you don’t need a plan, you just need big balls,” said Tom Boonen ahead of this weekend’s racing. I’d have thought that larger balls would be more susceptible to damage on Paris-Roubaix’s famously irregular road surfaces – but then I haven’t won the race four times and Tom has. Boonen came second this year.…

  • Eight pairs to watch in the 2014 Vuelta a Espana

    There aren’t enough race previews binding riders together into twos. Let’s be honest, all the best things come in pairs. Also Twixes. The Chrises – Chris Horner and Chris Froome Horner won last year. Froome’s one of the big favourites to win this year. What more do you need to know? Horner’s age, maybe? He’s…

  • Belgians fail to take second place in Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne

    Kuurne Brussels-Kuurne, first to eighth, by nationality: Belgian Dutch Belgian Belgian Belgian Belgian Belgian Belgian The number one Belgian was Tom Boonen, who might actually be a strong contender for that title in a broader sense. How it panned out The second cobbled classic was meant to finish with a bunch sprint. All the previews…

  • Middle Eastern foreshadowing

    Never let it be said that I am detached from my readers. I know what the readership is crying out for and that’s a half-arsed update about the Dubai Tour and stage one of the Tour of Qatar. The Dubai Tour This is the kind of race that’s decided by a prologue. Taylor Phinney’s 15-second…

  • Cobbled classics riders to watch

    Happy New Year and welcome to The Year of the Cobble. I was going to pay a bit more attention to the cobbled classics anyway, but it’s also worth following them to get a feel for this kind of racing ahead of the cobbled stage of the Tour de France – a day that could…

  • When Fabian Cancellara attacked Tom Boonen in the 2010 Ronde Van Vlaanderen

    Earlier in the week, I wrote about Belgian bike racing and how it’s different from what you’ll see in the Tour de France. I thought it might be good to add a few visuals to that, so here’s a video of part of the 2010 Ronde van Vlaanderen. You get a good feel for what…

  • How are Tom Boonen’s buttocks?

    Never let it be said that this website is overly focused on Tom Boonen’s barse. We’re not afraid to shift our attention by a few inches. Omega Pharma-QuickStep team manager, Patrick Lefevere, describes the current Boonen situation thus: “The buttocks injury put him out for the autumn.” To be honest, he probably meant barse.

  • How’s Tom Boonen’s perineum?

    It’s not great. But at least it’s improving. “It’s going in the right direction. The skin around my perineum has grown back but now I have to let it recuperate. I tried a couple of times to ride for an hour but it’s better that I save myself now and the skin grows strong again.…

  • Tom Boonen and Paris-Nice

    Very few people seem to be riding Paris-Nice this year. Compare the starting line-ups for the two World Tour stage races taking place at the minute – Tirreno-Adriatico and Paris-Nice – and the former features pretty much everyone you’ve heard of, while the latter is being led by Andrew Talansky, a hugely promising American cyclist,…

  • Tom Boonen’s arm

    What’s significant about Tom Boonen’s arm, you might ask. What’s significant is that it’s still there. Now that might not seem newsworthy, but you may have correctly inferred from my even mentioning this that it was at one point in grave danger. Apparently Tom got what I myself have diagnosed as ‘some sort of skeggy…