FAREWELL TO BOONEN
Tom Boonen’s retirement was so newsworthy in Belgium that one of the top Flemish newspapers, Het Nieuwsblad, deployed a journalist to follow his every move as the time ran down to Paris-Roubaix. Here, that sportswriter, Jan-Pieter de Vlieger, reflects on
Flemish journalist JP de Vlieger on following Tom Boonen in his final spring as a pro
At Het Nieuwsblad, I was recently promoted to Tom Boonen-paparazzo. I would be our journalist who followed Boonen’s every move throughout the last three months of his career. Much like Filippo Pozzato in the 2009 spring campaign, I would shadow him in every race.
It’s not that I had a particularly close connection with Boonen. We’re more or less the same age, but when I became a cycling reporter in 2008, he was a already an international superstar. There was a big and almost impenetrable fence around him, made of hangers-on, press officers, team staff and – admittedly – my own modest admiration of him. You should never meet your heroes, let alone follow them around the world for three months, but my assignment as ‘Boonen-watcher’ has been a rather enjoyable experience. Overexposed as he may be, Boonen always seems to have something interesting to say on any given subject. In various interviews, we’ve discussed disc brakes (“best invention ever”), social media (“worst invention ever”), alpacas (“sweet animals”), dolphins (“treacherous animals”), Belgian beer (“very diverse taste”), or even the Belgian schooling system (“not diverse enough”). Boonen is always outspoken; always has anecdotes to prove his point.
Interviewing Boonen is never hard. Getting an interview with Boonen is something completely different. The team shielded him quite strongly from journalists during his build-up to Paris-Roubaix, limiting his media commitments to press conferences. As a result, colleagues looking for a Boonen story started talking to his parents, teammates and managers. Some were even desperate enough to interview me. There was one question that came up very often and that I could never answer properly: “Why is Tom Boonen so popular in Belgium?”
Patrick Lefevere, the Quick-Step Floors boss, has a quote that sums it up quite nicely: “Everybody likes Tom Boonen. Men, women and children. From seven years old to 70 years old.” But then the question remains: why is that? The most obvious reason would be that Boonen is very authentic and anything but two-faced. As an observer, I’ve seen Boonen in all different kind of moods over the last three months: he was absolutely over the moon when he won the second stage of the Tour of San Luis; he was furious when he crashed in Oman; he was disappointed and annoyed by the chaos at the team bus after the second place in the TTT in Tirreno-Adriatico. Yet all these emotions are short-lived. He seems to need only one shower on the bus to rationalize away both failure and success. There is not a single quality that Belgians like better than having both feet on the ground.
Boonen always stayed true to himself. In 2002 when he finished third in his first Roubaix after winner Johan Museeuw – he famously said, “I’m not the new Museeuw, I’m Tom Boonen.” The strong dialect he had back then is the dialect he has today. A lot of the friends he had back then are apparently the friends he has today. Boonen never sold out: he was by far the most marketable sportsman in Belgium, yet he wouldn’t do a lot of commercial work, other than with the sponsors of his team. If people perhaps feel that Vincent Kompany – the Belgian football superstar – has become too corporate over the years, Boonen is quite the opposite: he has always stayed the people’s champion - he never tried to cultivate a certain image or cared too much about political correctness.
Boonen’s charity work is perhaps an example. He supports Move to Improve, an organisation for children with cerebral palsy. He helps Eric van Hove, a Belgian conceptual artist. These things have been in the media but Boonen never runs it as a PR operation. He’ll be the first to admit that he doesn’t do as much as he could.
I’ve always had a high regard for Boonen as a person and following him closely for three months hasn’t changed that. As far as I know he has no enemies in the peloton. He relates really easily to new team-mates. Young riders, just like young journalists, tend to be slightly nervous around him, but Boonen will always make the effort to break the ice. In Oman he roomed with Laurens De Plus, who is 15 years younger. They bonded over a PlayStation and since
Patrick Lefevere says, “Everybody likes Tom Boonen. Men, women and children. From seven years old to 70 years old.”
they both crashed earlier, Boonen even gave his younger team-mate a masterclass in applying band aids. De Plus was in awe: “I don’t know what it is, but his wounds heal so much faster than mine.”
Of course Boonen has an ego. Again in the TTT in Tirreno-Adriatico, there was at least one team-mate who was a bit annoyed that it had to be Boonen who crossed the line first of the team. But every so often he is very mindful of team-mates. After a hard day’s work by domestique Pieter Serry in Argentina, Boonen told the press for everyone to hear, “You guys have no idea how strong Pieter really is.”
There is nevertheless something strange about Tom Boonen’s popularity in Belgium. People call him ‘Tommeke’, meaning ‘little Tom’. It originates from the 2005 World Championships in Madrid. When Boonen launched his winning sprint towards the finish line, Sporza commentator Michel Wuyts yelled: “Tommeke, Tommeke, Tommeke, what are you doing now?” It has been a popular catchphrase ever since.
Back then the diminutive ‘Tommeke’ might have been appropriate. He had the boyish charm and innocent demeanour to go with it, even though he wore a T-shirt that said, ‘Will f*** on first date’ to his first press conference as world champion. But today – for me – ‘Tommeke’ doesn’t do justice to the big personality he has become. Boonen is flamboyant, outspoken, and internationally oriented in everything he does. He doesn’t fit the archetypal Briek Schotte stereotype of the ‘Flandrien’. Schotte, a double winner of the Tour of Flanders in the 1940s, famously said, ‘If the soup is good, everything is good.’ But Boonen has always needed more than just good soup.
Despite all the merits mentioned above, he has done many things throughout his
Most would agree that a certain excessiveness has always been part of Tom Boonen’s character
career that you just can’t reconcile with the humble, hardworking, working class hero. He crashed Lamborghinis, drove under the influence and tested positive more than once for more than one party drug. He moved to Monaco’s low-tax regime. Yet in Belgium it never took anything away from his popularity and he was never perceived as a Frank Vandenbroucke-like prima donna. Boonen always stayed ‘Tommeke’, our national hero.
Because interviews with Boonen were so hard to come by, I’ve spoken to a lot of people around him during the last three months. Most would agree that a certain excessiveness has always been part of his character. In Het Nieuwsblad we had a daily feature called ‘Typically Tom’, in which a close friend of Boonen would tell us a funny anecdote about him. Everybody we
approached had the same initial response: “An anecdote? I have so many, but none that are suitable to print in the paper.”
I’ve discussed Boonen’s drug use with Quick-Step Floors team doctor Yvan Vanmol, who has known him almost all of his life. Previously he had worked with André Boonen, Tom’s father. According to Vanmol, Boonen’s lifestyle has never been problematic and never took anything away from his racing. He calls the widely-publicized cocaine affair “a minor issue” in Boonen’s path through life. Coming from Vanmol, a doctor who has a ‘day job’ in a centre that assists people with substance abuse, that probably says a lot.
Boonen’s farewell has of course been a huge media item in Belgium – there were special magazines about him, special podcasts and at least two documentaries on television. Studio Brussel, a popular radio station, composed a tribute song called ‘Ziet den Tom’ (‘Look at Tom’) that was quite popular. Everybody wanted a piece of Boonen and because of that it was very difficult to get an exclusive one-on-one interview. There was a lot of back and forth but eventually I could speak with him during Tirreno-Adriatico in a very unsociable hotel lobby that had a strange painting of a goldfish hanging on the wall. We discussed his wins in the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix and the alpacas mentioned above, but also the drugs. After a hard day of racing Boonen wasn’t up for too much introspection, but he would gladly testify that this whole episode had made him into the person he is today. One line in particular stood out: “I haven’t always been proud of who I was, but I’m proud of who I have become.”
After spending three months in the wheel of Boonen, my conclusion would have to be the same: he is a Belgian cycling icon for the modern age. He’s not a flawless superhero, but a he is a very authentic character. To sum him up, he was a monumental bike rider, who never let his incredible talent get in the way of being a good guy.