Rojas wins opening stage at Tour of Qatar

José Joaquin Rojas (Movistar) claimed victory on the opening stage of the Tour of Qatar after unleashing a well-timed sprint to fend off Tom Boonen (Etixx-QuickStep) and Arnaud Démare (FDJ) at the Sealine Beach Resort.

Buffeted by crosswinds at various points through the afternoon, the peloton was reduced to just 51 riders in the finale and in the closing kilometres Rojas’ teammate Alejandro Valverde had a cameo on the front, helping to stretch out the leading group and make it difficult for those caught behind to move up.

In the final sprint, Rojas latched onto Boonen’s lead-out and then surprised by opening his effort from distance. The Spaniard had enough in the tank to hold on for the win, although the fast-finishing Démare will rue that he was so far back when the sprint began in earnest.

“It was a demanding finale, especially before last 10 kilometres when Bora and Trek split the group,” Rojas said. “With 500 metres to go I took Niki Terpstra’s wheel when he came up on the side and when I saw he was out of gas, I jumped with 300 metres to go. The wind was blowing to the left, so anyone moved up there would have to take the brunt of it.”

The 130-kilometre trek across the desert of Qatar’s interior was typical of the fare one has come to expect from the race over the years, with crosswinds scattering the peloton into echelons at several points and riders battling grimly to fight their way back on. A war of attrition, in short.

When the dust settled in the Gulf on Sunday afternoon, some 51 riders were safely in the front group but others – including Bradley Wiggins (Sky) and Marcel Kittel (Giant-Alpecin) – saw their overall ambitions suffer a blow when they conceded 33 seconds in a fraught finale.

Both Boonen and Peter Sagan (Tinkoff-Saxo), meanwhile, crashed at the second intermediate sprint but each man recovered sufficiently to contest for the stage honours, with both of their teams prominent in forcing the final selection on the run-in to the line.

“When Sagan crashed I was on his wheel, and I stumbled over him but I was going about five kilometres per hour when it happened so there’s nothing bad,” Boonen said afterwards, while Sagan’s directeur sportif Tristan Hofman praised his efforts on his debut in Tinkoff-Saxo colours.

“He has lost skin and is naturally in pain, however he hasn’t broken anything,” Hofman said. “I’m very impressed by his willpower. He didn’t have to participate in the final sprint but he stayed up there in the front.”

Sedate start

The opening two hours of racing offered a rather sedate prelude to what was to follow as the peloton set out into a block headwind, and when Luca Sterbini (Bardiani-CSF) and Jarl Salomein (Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise) opted to try their luck early on, the bunch gladly left them to it. They built up a lead of seven minutes at one point, but their days in front were numbered once the race hit a section of crosswind around the midway point and they were caught shortly afterwards.

Etixx-QuickStep looked to flex their muscles at that juncture, and together with Fabian Cancellara’s Trek Factory Racing squad, they formed an echelon at the front of the peloton that shattered it into disparate groups. Valverde, Wiggins and Nacer Bouhanni (Cofidis) were among those caught out on that occasion but they stayed within 25 seconds of the Boonen-Cancellara group and latched back on once the course turned back into a headwind section.

Nikias Arndt (Giant-Alpecin) claimed the bonus at the second sprint before Greg Van Avermaet (BMC) made a bold but doomed solo attempt in the headwind shortly afterwards – as much with a view to testing himself ahead of the cobbled classics as to making a serious bid for stage honours, one imagines.

With 40 kilometres remaining, however, a more realistic bid for glory materialised when Astana’s Dutch tandem of Lars Boom and Lieuwe Westra broke clear with Tinkoff-Saxo’s Matti Brecschel. The trio worked fluidly together, with Boom in particular pedalling with real facility, and they established a lead of almost a minute as they entered the final 20 kilometres.

Etixx-QuickStep, however, again set to work on the front of the bunch and when Trek and Bora-Argon 18 later joined in the pace-making, they pegged back the leaders and then forced another late split in the peloton. Kittel, Wiggins, Edvald Boasson Hagen (MTN-Qhubeka), Luca Paolini (Katusha) and Filippo Pozzato (Lampre-Merida) were among those caught out, and they had little hope of getting back on terms in the time that remained.

The sprint, as is often the case here, proved difficult to organise. Alexander Kristoff (Katusha) and Bouhanni were among those stuck in the gate, and they could only manage 9th and 10th, respectively, while Andrea Guardini (Astana) seemed to be blocked and Sam Bennett (Bora-Argon) was left with too much to do.

Instead, it was the canny Rojas who picked his way carefully through the disarray and then unfurled a crisp sprint to take first blood at the Tour of Qatar and the gold jersey of race leader.

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