Red Bull defends Evenepoel's 'no race' Tour de France strategy: 'Already gave excellent signs'

Jonas Vingegaard has won the Giro d’Italia, Paul Seixas is riding the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Tadej Pogacar will tackle the Tour de Suisse. Most of the Tour de France favourites are racing somewhere in preparation for the Tour de France. Except Remco Evenepoel. He will leave the race bike untouched for 68 days, a that choice that needed some explaining by his team leaders.

Evenepoel made his Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe debut in January and rode a spring that lasted until Liège-Bastogne-Liège in April. “That long competition block weighed heavily,” Klaas Lodewyck tells Het Laatste Nieuws. “25 race days is not extremely many, but it was mainly about the way he approached them. Remco was constantly racing at a very high level.”

But that was not fully sustainable. In the later weeks, signs of fatigue in the Belgian began to show. “In the week after his Amstel Gold Race victory, you could already see that he was trying to recover and wanted to take things a bit easier. The mental sharpness was still there, but it was countered by the physical fatigue that was building up.”

In Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Evenepoel therefore could not compete for the win at all, with Tadej Pogacar taking victory ahead of Paul Seixas. Evenepoel still finished a fine third. “He dragged that third place in Liège out of the fire purely through determination and resilience. Chapeau. Because for the same money he could also have let it go. And then he would have had nothing at all.”

After La Doyenne, however, it was clear that the original plan was not quite working. And so an adjustment had to be made. “All together, we took a few figurative steps back and asked ourselves: ‘Okay, how can we get him to the Tour start in Barcelona on Saturday 4 July in the best possible shape?’” says Zak Dempster. “Different options were put on the table and weighed up: what could work and what could not,” Lodewyck adds.

It has sparked plenty of reaction in the cycling world. How can you possibly ride a good Tour after more than two months without racing? “A set-up like this is not new for him either,” the Australian team director says. “Remember his winning Vuelta in 2022. Back then too, he had raced hardly at all in the nearly two months beforehand.” Evenepoel then rode Clásica San Sebastián 19 days before the start and won it.

That experience is supposed to bring success this time too. It is a small experiment, Lodewyck admits. “But personally I am convinced that he will not come out of this worse than he would from a programme with competition. The Tour of Catalonia made it clear that we needed to place more emphasis on climbing. Well, that is what we are taking the time for.”

And Evenepoel is of course not sitting still. The two-time Olympic champion is in altitude training with Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, and that is going very well. “The training he completed in weeks two and three already gave excellent signs. Remco left the camp feeling better than when he arrived. And that was ultimately the goal.”

They also did some reconnaissance, especially for the final week of the Tour de France. But: “His condition is the main thing. If that is good, you can usually digest quite a lot. As for the recons, we are seeing what is exactly compatible. But from now on we want to spend every day on perfect training and perfect recovery. And see how far we can get with that against the competition. We believe in it.”

Author: David Bavin-Hobbs - [email protected]