Peter Sagan succeeds himself by winning the rainbow jersey of world champion for the second consecutive time at the end of a cinematic sprint by burning Mark Cavendish and Tom Boonen. The Doha world championship ends with a regal podium, with three champions already world champions in their careers in the first three places, a sumptuous sprint that saves a poorly planned race, in a desolate public void, with a scenography – except for the 150 km endless desert – laminated and soulless of a location that smacks of business and little or nothing of cycling.
The final circuit resembled that of the old post-Tour kermesse rather than a track destined to assign the most coveted jersey. Only the finishing order has a world class, expressing the best of the values in contention, once the flat altitude of the course had excluded the greats of stage races from the start-list.
Boring carousel once we arrived on the artificial island of Pearl, the race – before the final sprint – had experienced its most spectacular moments in the desert where a wind blew that risked causing the bikes to wheelie. More than the heat then the fans that were created by dividing the group into several sections were fatal. It was then, in conjunction with the reversal of the route from north to south, that Boonen climbed to the chair, able to enter the head section, dragging behind him five teammates from the Belgian national team including Greg Van Avermaet, the Olympic gold medalist from Rio .
They were good at hooking up another twenty runners to the Belgian train including Sagan, Cavendish, Kristoff, Matthews, Terpstra and our own Viviani, Nizzolo, Bennati and Guarnieri. From that moment on for the super favorites of the German squadron – Greipel, Kittel and Degenkolb – the world championship became an unattainable chimera. Same fate for the French Bouhanni. Another eagerly awaited protagonist, the Colombian Gaviria, also came out of the race involved in a tangle that was created 165 km from the finish when the Australian Luke Durbridge slowed down and was rear-ended by the Slovenian Luka Mezgec.
Once the desert was over, the world championship was a limited matter among all those still attached to Boonen's squad. Nothing more happened before the last 2200 meters when the Dutchman Leezer took off from the leading group, still under the banner of the last km he had an advantage of over one hundred metres. But the tulip, when he could see the finish line, was grabbed. And to ennoble the world championship of the emir who risked ending up with a nobody, Sagan thought of it in extremis who, emerging like a velociraptor between Nizzolo and the barriers, took back that rainbow jersey conquered for the first time last year in Richmond with action then as a great finisseur.
A consecutive encore succeeded by only five riders in history before Sagan: the first was the Belgian Georges Ronsse (1928-29) followed after the war by two other Belgians Rik Van Steenbergen (1956-57) and Rik Van Looy (1960-61) and more recently by the Italians Gianni Bugno (1991-92) and Paolo Bettini (2006-07).
