abandoned the Giro after Stage 13 to participate to the Tour of Belgium, where he won the opening stage by outsprinting Arnaud Démare. Boonen's season was brought to an end by a crash on the second stage of the Abu Dhabi Tour in October, which left him unconscious. He sustained a temporal fracture from the accident. After initially being told by doctors that it would take six months to recover, in a newspaper interview in December Boonen stated that he was training well two months after the crash without any trouble. However the accident had left him with permanent damage to his hearing. He also said that he was "100 per cent certain" that he would compete in motor racing after retiring from competitive cycling, with the aim of competing in the 24 Hours of Zolder. 2016 After enduring a relatively quiet series of performances through most of the cobbled classics, Boonen finished second at Paris–Roubaix, being pipped on the line by Mat Hayman. Despite not clinching the win, Boonen's aggressive performance in the race was acclaimed by former Paris–Roubaix champions Bernard Hinault and Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle, who described him as "a warrior" and "magnificent" respectively. In July he announced that he had signed a short-term contract with Etixx-Quick Step and would retire immediately after the 2017 Paris–Roubaix. Later that month, he won the London-Surrey Classic in a sprint finish, as well as the Brussels Cycling Classic. He ended the season with third place in the World Championship road race in Qatar, where he was beaten by reigning world champion Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish. 2017 At the very beginning of the season, Boonen won stage 2 of the Vuelta a San Juan. This was the first professional victory for a cyclist using disc brakes. However, he subsequently suffered a series of crashes at the Tour of Oman, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Tirreno–Adriatico. At Milan–San Remo, Boonen worked as a domestique for his teammates, helping Julian Alaphilippe to third place. He resumed his cobbled classics campaign at E3 Harelbeke, where he animated the race with an attack on the Taaienberg on his way to an eighth-place finish. He followed this up with a sixth place at Gent–Wevelgem, which he described as a satisfactory result, and a good indicator of form going into the cobbled Monuments. At the Tour of Flanders, Boonen had an eventful race: he led the Quick-Step squad into