One of the many new recruits to the Quick Step team for 2011 is Dutch champion Niki Terpstra. The 26-year-old spent the last four years at the recently folded Milram team; he achieved modest results while there which, as new teammate Tom Boonen indicates, may have been down to his style of racing.
“I have cursed him many times,” said Boonen to De Telegraaf. “Niki attacked in the craziest places and completely went against the rules of the peloton. It was certainly not his goal to the most popular rider.”
Since getting to know the Dutch champion though, at the teams get togethers and training camps in the Spanish Mediterranean resort of Calpe, the former World and Belgian champion is coming around to his new teammate.
“Niki is Niki,” he said. “He is an incredibly strong rider. In the World Championships he rode the others off his wheel; he could have been World champion. I didn’t know him, but now during the training camps I must say that he is a great guy.”
With a number of classics specialists, whose specific job in the spring is to deliver Boonen to the latter stages of races, have departed the team this year, including two-time Ronde van Vlaanderen winning Belgian champion Stijn Devolder and Kevin Hulsmans. Boonen is pleased to find that the acquisition of Terpstra will go some way at least to replacing them.
“He is certainly an important reinforcement for the team,” the Belgian confirmed.
For Terpstra’s part, he can see where other riders may have had a problem with his riding style; he maintains though, that this was his best way of getting results given the strength – or otherwise – of the Milram team.
“I understand what Tom was saying,” he told De Telegraaf. "Look, it was never my goal to bully the other riders, but at Milram I often sat in the finales of the classics completely isolated.
“Then you had to sometimes squeeze between riders,” he explained, “or else were you beaten. And if I felt that a break was going, then I often chose to go for it to get the TV coverage. Then I’d go into the attack and would be hanging off the front, even though I knew it was doomed, even though I’d ride 10km and be ignominiously caught."
Whether or not Terpstra will change his ways now that he is a Quick Step rider, Tom Boonen will certainly be glad that he’s on his side now.