Tom Boonem may be the King of the opening Belgian WorldTour race of the season with 5 wins but today he was out of luck completely in E3 Harelbeke as his teammates Niki Terpstra and Stijn Vandenbergh outshone him. He still managed 11th in the sprint from the chasing group but apparently he was crying in pain as he did so due to a pain in his thumb caused by a crash.

He missed Milan-Sanremo and did Wednesday’s Dwars door Vlaanderen instead but admitted that he didn’t have any expectations of himself in terms of adding a sixth win.

"I didn’t expect a lot. Wednesday wasn’t really good either. I had a really rough week," Boonen said after the race. "Forty-eight hours after Waregem you can’t expect miracles. My thumb is my major concern now. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s torn or strained. I rode all race long with tears in my eyes."

This is a major concern for Omega Pharma-Quick Step as Boonen was excpected to lead the team in both the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.

"It’s never good to ride over the cobbles when your hand hurts. I did 100km with a lot of pain. On the climbs there’s often a gutter so that was fine but on the cobbles it hurts a lot," Boonen said. "I managed to finish the race so I’m not panicking. Most of the times they’re able to do something with these kind of injuries but it’ll hurt a lot. It’s a bit swollen. It will probably be alright."

The TV cameras did not catch the crash that happened just before La Houppe, the third climb of the day. Race radio only announced Svein Tuft abandoned as a result of the crash but it turned out Boonen was also a victim of the crash.

"There was a very big crash in front of the peloton, in about 20th position. Only Stijn [Vandenbergh], Iljo [Keisse] and Martin [Velits] made it through. We had to keep chasing until just after the Taaienberg. Then we were back in front but at that moment our race was already over because we had done an enormous effort to get back with two, three men.

"It was a long miserable day. It was a pursuit of about an hour. You have to get over the steep climbs and the tricky descents where you know you have to be in front. Team are always riding flat out to maintain their positions and we were riding in 80-100th position, trying to move up while taking huge risks."

As usual in the Cobbled races, there were plenty of crashes. Boonen puts this down to E3’s difficult course.

"It went really hard so everybody was tired. Nobody’s giving half a metre to anybody else, so it was always on the limit, as soon as the race really started. The newly designed course mattered a lot, too. It’s true that there were a lot of climbs but the race wasn’t as open as other years. There’s no moment where the racing really starts because you wait for the Paterberg and the [Oude] Kwaremont. That makes it really nervous and then you get a lot of crashes. The speed was really high when riding towards the climbs but on them nothing happened. They kept the road closed and slowly headed for the top. Sometimes it’s interesting to give a race fewer climbs to make it more attractive."