Remco Evenepoel heads to the Tour de France as a co-leader alongside Florian Lipowitz. 📸 SWpix.
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The final eight-rider roster won’t be announced until a few days before the Tour de France, but Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe certainly have a wealth of talent to choose from as they narrow their options.
Of course, they head into the biggest race of the year with co-leadership from Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz, while Jai Hindley looks set for a super-domestique role following his Giro d’Italia podium. With five more places up for grabs, we analyse the team’s options for the final set of places.
“We have our leaders in Lipo and Remco, and you’ve got a bunch of other riders who can either play key support roles or go for stages,” Zak Dempster told me earlier this week.
“So if you look at Maxim’s performance right now, that’s put him in a really good place to be selected. You’ve got Jai Hindley, Martinez, Jordi, and then you have this cluster of support riders like Denz, Cattaneo, Van Dijke, Tratnik, so it’s a long list still for now, and we’ve still got Suisse and Slovenia, so we need to see how the performances are there and then make the decision,” he told me before adding a bit more context towards the rest of the short-list.
“Jordi is in contention for the Tour de France, but Moscon is taking a rest now after Copenhagen to look at other goals. Vlasov is on the list,” the Australian said.
There are others, too, and in this feature, we look at the 12 riders most likely to be in contention for the Tour.
We’ve not seen Evenepoel in action since the Ardennes, but Red Bull remain confident that the Belgian rider can arrive at the Tour de France in peak condition and contend for the overall classification. Evenepoel’s pure ability on the bike has never been in doubt, and his performance at the 2024 Tour de France, and, of course, his Vuelta-winning ride, provided enough evidence to suggest that a Tour win could one day be a reality. But last year also underscored that, unlike Vingegaard and Pogačar, he has a weakness in his locker. Last year, the preparation was rushed and disjointed due to an injury over the winter, and while he came away with a stage win, the rush to get ready for the Tour meant that, although he looked polished, his engine wasn’t properly tuned. Wrapping the Belgian in cotton wool and putting him through his paces at altitude feels like a correction to that experience, and at the very least Evenepoel should be in contention for the yellow jersey on stage 1.
When I talked to Demspter, I asked about how leadership would work between the two co-leaders.
“They’ve raced together before, and at Catalunya we saw a really good dynamic between them, even with Remco committing to Lipo on that sixth stage. They’ve been in Sierra Nevada training together, and there were some discussions there on how we manage the whole team. They’re on equal footing in terms of leaders, but they’re also very different riders. From the discussions we’ve had with them, and they see it too, the start of the Tour suits Remco a bit better, and then later suits Lipo a bit better. That’s a huge positive for them, to have someone else as a bit of a different co-leader because they can use each other and protect each other in order to get the best result we possibly can. They’re both ambitious, but they’re in a much stronger position together than alone,” he said.