Tom Boonen  hopes to leave the Sheikh Khalifa Hospital today, but he will have to stay in Abu Dhabi for two weeks. "To fly involves risk of a blood clot," said the unfortunate leader of Etixx-QuickStep, who suffered a skull fracture of 15 centimeters last Friday. On Sunday he told his story to the Belgian newspapers.

Until the time of his crash in the second stage of the Abu Dhabi Tour, he remembers everything but from there his memory is very limited: “Someone rode over a piece of reinforced steel, which duly went into the wheel of Theo Bos,” he told Sporza.

“Bos was on the ground with someone else. I followed in line, I tried to avoid the collision and caught Theo sideways. I went over the bike and I went into the ground head first.

“After the fall I apparently recovered consciousness, but I remember nothing of it. It was only in the ambulance that I came to. There was blood on my hand that ran from my ear. I did not know where I was, what had happened. I was definitely gone for half an hour."

Boonen remains calm even though the verdict, skull fracture, sounds serious.

"I quickly got my memory back, I know where I was before the fall happened, I remember everything after I had returned to consciousness, and my motor skills are good. I can talk normally, I can see everything.

"All that was reassuring. If there is no pressure on the brain in the first five hours, the greatest danger has passed."

Boonen hopes to leave the hospital today, but he cannot return home yet.. Under his skull at the site of the fracture there is some blood, and he also has hearing problems in his left ear.

"That blood will disappear, but it will take time.The doctors advised me to stay one or two weeks. Purely due to the risk when flying. There is a risk of a blood clot. And at an altitude of 2000 meters, that would be dangerous. So I'm going to listen to them and not take risks."

"It could well be that Lore [his girlfriend]will come here with the kids. We're doing a holiday.

"And on Thursday I can celebrate my birthday. It suck but I am realistic enough to realize that a birthday is a day like any other. That day I have planned a CT scan."

The question remains when Boonen will be riding again. He missed the classics in 2015 and has big goals for those races in 2016.

"That's hard to say. The doctors speak of six months of doing nothing, for safety. But I believe it is more like a month. That's about the time that a break needs to recover. They are especially afraid of the trauma, but when I'm back in Belgium, I will be examined thoroughly once more."