Tour of Qatar

The second of the trio of Middle East races is the Tour of Qatar. No punchy climbs here, instead 5 flat stages with a short TT. The big deal here is the wind, Qatar's exposed peninsular means the Tour is designed to take full advantage of any wind it can, the expected echelons could completely determine this race.

However there are 10, 6, 4 seconds available at the finish of each of the flat stages so the sprinters have a lot of bonus seconds available if they can control the stages and then try and hang on against the TT specialists.

The most important aspect here is the wind, and as ever Qatar will not disappoint with some really windy days forecast, directionally it doesn't look ideal for echelons versus the route of the stages but I think it is likely that we get a stage determined by echelons, or at least reduced bunch finishes of say 50 riders with the rest cut off by echelons.

The TT is 10.9 km and that should give the TT specialists 20-30 seconds over sprinters who can TT quite well like Marcel Kittel and Arnaud Demare.

There is a really stellar line up of riders here and some interesting team selections, some teams have very little sprint talent but are loaded with Classics specialists who will be going full tilt to try and break the stages up and eliminate sprinters. There are plenty of direction changes in these stages and riders will have to be really alert to make sure they are in position whenever echelon racing could happen, this makes for nervous racing and a hard fast week.

The sprint teams are as follows;

Sprint focussed; Giant-Alpecin (Kittel), Cofidis (Bouhanni), Bora (Bennett), MTN (Bos), Katusha (Kristoff), FDJ (Demare)

The problem Giant are going to have is who works with them to control the race for sprints, I suspect Cofidis and Katusha will but I don't think they will have enough firepower to not suffer via an untimely echelon at some point in the 4 stages which could be affected (the last stage should be more sheltered from the wind).

As going against these teams are some real classics powerhouses, teams who will suddenly hit the front in concert in the middle of a stage when there is some crosswind with a surge of power. One rider mid pack loses the wheel infront and a gap of 1 bike length becomes 20 bike lengths and then 30 seconds worth and the bunch is split.

Teams who will attempt this include; Astana, BMC, Etixx - Quickstep, Orica, Sky, Tinkoff, and Trek.
These teams have an array of brilliant riders who I think should break this race at some point in those stages. Therefore I will be restricting my GC picks to riders within these strong teams who have more chance of being the right side of an echelon.

The other factors in GC picks is it is really useful to have some sprint speed to try and get some bonus seconds at the finish and mid race, and also be able to do a good TT performance.

Contenders for GC then in my mind are as follows;

Astana - Westra, Boom
BMC - Gilbert, GVA (not the best of friends these two, will be interesting who leads)
Etixx-Quickstep - Vandenbergh, Van Keirsbulck, Terpstra, Boonen
FDJ - Demare
IAM - Haussler
Orica - Lancaster, Howard
Katusha - Kristoff
Sky - Wiggins, Stannard
Tinkoff - Sagan, Breschel, Bodnar
Trek - Cancellara, Steegmans

I would include EBH in this list, but MTN's team looks really weak apart from for sprint finishes when they have Bos, Sbaragli and EBH. They could detract from each other and EBH's GC chances by going with Bos in the sprints.

I'm not going to go through each candidate as any of the above could win this race in my mind.

My number one candidate is Fabian Cancellara, now each year Fabian doesn't really bother too much with this race and that is the only reason he is not a shorter price. However this year he has been making noises about wanting to win early in the season and more often, he got involved in a sprint in Mallorca when normally he would not risk a sprint for fear of a silly crash. I think this could indicate he will be in Qatar to win, Trek bring a strong team and Cancellara should be one of the fastest in the time trial. He also has a strong sprint at the end of hard stages and it would not be a surprise to see him pick up bonus seconds with podium placings or mid stage. At 19/1 with Ladbrokes I think I'll throw 1.5pt on him to win here.



Stage 1 (as tweeted earlier)

Looks like a headwind or cross headwind all day which makes a sprint more likely. Cross wind in the final 10k or so but that should be when the various sprint trains are fighting hard for position so I think it will be a sprint.

Kittel 2pts win at 15/8

Sam Bennett to bt Heinrich Haussler 1pt 5/4 PP
Arnaud Demare to bt Kristoff 1pt 5/6 365