Whatever Remco Evenepoel does or does not achieve in the Tour de France this July, it’s worth remembering that he has already had a good Classics season.
Third in the Tour of Flanders in his debut there was a success, so it’s not like his year will be a bad one if, say, he now only wins one stage in the Tour. I think with Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard there, if Remco can get third and wins the time trial that’d be a good race for him, whilst for it to be a great Tour, he’d have to get a mountain stage win against Pogačar or wear the yellow jersey.
But can he achieve even more than that? In many ways, that’s Remco’s problem right now in Belgium. Because even if he did get third, then a lot of people will say he didn’t perform well. While somebody else gets just one top 10 in a stage and they’d say, ‘Ah, that was a really good Tour de France’, in Remco’s case, even being on the podium of a Grand Tour – which for me is as good as it can get right now, barring major surprises – that just wouldn’t be good enough.
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Within those double standards, if his time trialling is taken for granted, the high mountains are going to be where Remco’s Tour is really judged. But again, the standards he is judged by are wrong. That’s because if you put him in a race where there is no Pogačar and no Vingegaard, then he’s one of the best on the climbs because he can choose his own tempo on them. But his problem is that when Pogačar attacks, he can put Remco in the red zone and after a few minutes, he explodes. He loses 30 or 40 seconds in those two minutes, after which he gets to his own tempo again and he doesn’t get dropped that badly. He’s a time triallist and once he gets to his own pace, he’s really capable. But by that point he’s lost that minute on the climb, so it’s difficult.
He’s far from being alone in having this problem when Pogačar attacks and unfortunately Remco’s upper limit isn’t quite good enough to follow Pogačar. But maybe now with the new training approach Remco has, it could be he’s been training like a maniac to get his VO2 Max up and he’ll get that extra percentage point – and it really is just 1% difference. But remember that if on paper it looks easy, in practice is another thing.
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Remco Evenepoel in action earlier this year (Image credit: Getty Images)
Talking of numbers, I’ve seen all this stuff about his FTP value of 425 and actually I think it’s a number that’s lower than what he is actually pushing – it’s just a training number. For example, my own FTP on paper was always 430 or 435 with a weight of 69kg. But in the races, it could actually rise to something like 460 for 20 minutes. So what your FTP is in the race and on paper are two very different things.
As for the why he published that number, he may explain that at some point before the Tour so it’ll become clear, but right now that’s hard to understand. After all, the two guys that are ahead of him in the Tour will likely always stay in front of him – and that’s Vingegaard and Pogačar. But I suppose that at least for a lot of the guys that are training at home, they now know what numbers they have to push to be at the top level…
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As for other rivals apart from Vingegaard and Pogačar, I’m not expecting as much from Paul Seixas as some people are this July. He can always surprise me, and his numbers for a 19-year-old are incredible, and he will for sure be a Tour de France winner one day. But this is his first Grand Tour and while I think he’ll be there in the mix at the top level for the first two weeks, the third week is always something of a question mark for a lot of riders, and that includes Seixas.
It’s even true for riders who have finished on the podium of a Grand Tour. You can get sick in the build-up, say, and that can sometimes only emerge as a problem in the third week because you’re missing 1% or 2% in your endurance and in the last part of a Grand Tour, you pay a really high price for those tiny gaps. So Seixas has to learn how his body will react after two weeks and what happens in the third when Pogačar and Vingegaard unleash their demons, and as a result, I think it’ll be difficult for him to be on the final podium.
How Evenepoel works with Florian Lipowitz is another story. Lipowitz is a teammate but he could be a bit of a problem, because imagine Lipowitz attacks a bit early on a climb and Remco is not allowed to chase, then he’s a bit blocked behind because of team tactics. You’re just stuck on the wheels in a group.
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Remco Evenepoel leads Florian Lipowitz on a mountain stage in Catalunya (Image credit: Getty Images)
For sure they will have some discussions before the Tour, but they will have to reach some solid agreements. Because at some point you have to make a decision, one of them may have to sacrifice his options for the other. It’s a team sport, and you can’t just race for a top five placing in the Tour. Because then if you end up in fourth and fifth, say, and nobody’s on the podium, then it will look a bit stupid.
What will also define Remco’s Tour is how he comes out of such a long time before it without any racing, training for over two months purely for the Tour. I can only speak for myself but if I didn’t do any racing for a month, then the first few days of competition were always horrible, because your legs miss the speed. I just hope for him that’s not the case, because for me not racing so long would be a really bad decision. On top of that, the first day of the Tour is a team time trial and it’s not like Remco can sit back, he’s the TT powerhouse for his squad. I’ve already seen that when there are TTTs, if the other guys do 20-second turns, Remco’s doing 40 to one minute. So the results of the TTT will be almost completely on his shoulders.
On the other hand, I know Remco a little bit, and I also know that when he’s in a race, he’s there to win and not just follow wheels. You could see that at the beginning of the year, when he was at preparation races and he kept on having to win: he’s a difficult rider to contain. It doesn’t matter if you say ‘Please, just go to the Tour de Suisse and we’ll do it as preparation, just going for it on two stages’. If he can attack 60 kilometres from the line, then he will.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Not only that, all of the parameters in training are controllable, you have a reduced risk of crashing, a lower risk of getting sick. But truth to tell, we’ll only really know by the end of July, not the beginning, if this training strategy was a good or bad decision.
In fact, Remco’s problem is a different one – it’s that for some people, only winning is good enough at this point and that’s a bit of a shame. Particularly because while Remco went to Red Bull to win races, I think winning the Tour will be really difficult. It’s not impossible, but realistically, I think he only has a small chance.
It’s not that some people back home have less sympathy for Remco because he left QuickStep, rather that there’s something about him and his results that they always look at differently. He won six of seven races in the first two months of the year, and then just because he was dropped on one climb in the UAE Tour, their theory is that he’s not performing well. So he can achieve whatever he can, but the moment he doesn’t perform, even if he crashes and has bad legs as a result, they’ll always say that’s no excuse. Or even after finishing third in Flanders, expectations were higher for Liège and the Ardennes races, and when he didn’t perform so well, they burned him down again.
So that’s Remco’s story: he’s in a position where even if he does win, he’s still doing something wrong in the eyes of a lot of people – and a lot of journalists as well. And unfortunately it seems like nothing can change that, not even (maybe) finishing third in the Tour de France this July.
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