What next for Remco Evenepoel after Tour abandon? - Analysis

The Tour de France will be a poorer place without Remco Evenepoel. The Belgian was never going to win this year’s race, but in victory and in defeat, he never makes for anything less than compelling viewing.

Tadej Pogačar is the best cyclist in the world, of course, but his brilliance has become so routine as to make the miraculous seem mundane. Evenepoel, on the other hand, is a more vulnerable kind of galactico on the bike and, in many ways, a more box office star off it.

Evenepoel was condemned to do his growing up in public after swapping a budding football career for scorching the earth in junior races. He was hot-housed for greatness, jumping straight into the professional ranks, but the most striking thing about him was how readily he seemed to accept the attention and perhaps even - whisper it - enjoy it.

Young riders thrust into the limelight tend to make hesitant interviewees, their attraction to the brightness tempered by their wariness of the flame. Yet Evenepoel never had any qualms about his place in the public eye, giving freewheeling interviews in three languages as a teenager in which he dared to dream aloud about his future ambitions.

“The three Grand Tours… The World Championships… The Olympics...” he told a group of us in a hotel in Québec towards the end of his debut season in 2019. He was smiling as he spoke, but he certainly wasn’t joking.

He has ticked much of that laundry list in the meantime, including the Vuelta a España in 2022, but despite that win and a podium finish on his Tour debut a year ago, doubts have persisted about Evenepoel’s ability to last the course at Grand Tours.

That charge is unfair, or at least exaggerated, but it will return to haunt him again after his disappointment at this year’s Tour. 

Evenepoel’s sustained moments of plenty over the years have been interspersed with days where an exposed Achilles heel has brought him crashing down to earth – and those days have tended to come in three-week races.

After Saturday’s ordeal on the Col du Tourmalet, Evenepoel’s Grand Tour record reads: six starts, one overall victory, and three abandons.

Movistar manager Eusebio Unzué summed up the situation neatly last year when asked about Evenepoel’s prospects of winning his debut Tour de France. “Remco can win the Tour, but only if he rides like Remco for 21 days out of 21,” he said. “If he only rides like Remco for 20 days out of 21, then it’ll be difficult.”

The trouble for Evenepoel this year is that he only really rode like Remco once, en route to victory in the Caen time trial on stage 5. That win aside, he never quite looked comfortable on the race, and the impression was borne out when he was distanced on the Col du Soulor on stage 13.

Evenepoel’s ability to limit the damage there spoke volumes about his mental strength, but he must have known that, from a physical standpoint, his race was already run. When Jonas Vingegaard caught and passed him in the finale of the Peyragudes time trial, it was clear that Evenepoel’s Tour was only likely to get a whole lot worse, and quickly.

Even though he still lay third overall after the time trial, there was already a sense that Soudal-QuickStep had resigned themselves to the reality of the situation. In Pau on Saturday morning, Evenepoel’s coach Koen Pelgrim confessed to Sporza that his rider’s struggles in the final days of the Critérium du Dauphiné had continued into his pre-Tour training camp at Tignes.

“He hadn’t recovered well from the Dauphiné and was struggling with his training,” Pelgrim said. “We had to adjust that with extra rest. He struggled with the intensity, and then you know it wasn’t the ideal approach.”

It was the kind of thing a coach might typically say after his rider abandons rather than beforehand, but perhaps it served a purpose to prepare the Belgian public for what was to follow. Even before Evenepoel was dropped on the Tourmalet, expectations had been revised downwards. His decision to climb off and into a team car was still a shock, but it was hardly a surprise.

Evenepoel himself was at a loss to explain his struggles in the Pyrenees when he spoke with reporters at the finish. In the absence of one obvious explanation, he touched upon a number of possible avenues. It’s certainly probable that he was affected by his delayed start to the season after a heavy training crash in December, but it’s also possible that he has been afflicted by illness. 

Whatever the reason, there was little purpose in trying to bludgeon his way through the remainder of this Tour on willpower alone. At the 2023 Vuelta, Evenepoel’s GC challenge fell apart on the road to the Tourmalet – his Waterloo, it seems – but he responded by winning the next day and attacking all the way to Madrid. 

But that was a simple jour sans, one day out of 21. At this Tour, Evenepoel had been trending downwards throughout the second week. “You can have a bad day once in a while, but three in a row, that's not normal,” he said.

Evenepoel will be assessed further in the coming days before he decides on his race programme for the remainder of the year, but he was already speaking about “September” – the World Championships in Rwanda – during his parley with reporters on Saturday evening.

Indeed, within minutes of Evenepoel’s abandon, new national coach Serge Pauwels was busy talking up the rider’s prospects on the road and in the time trial at both the Worlds and the subsequent European Championships. “He can be dangerous in the Autumn at the Worlds and European Championships,” Pauwels told Sporza. “He can definitely make something of his season there.”

Those objectives look the most likely for Evenepoel in the latter part of the season, even if there will surely be a push in some quarters for him to ride the Vuelta. The five-week turnaround, however, might not be to his liking. Those close to Evenepoel have always noted that he likes a “project” – namely, he revels in the meticulous three-month build-up to a Grand Tour. In that light, the Vuelta might simply come too soon.

All the while, the speculation over Evenepoel’s future will rumble on. Daniel Benson has reported that a deal with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe has “never been closer” to being finalised. It’s unlikely that Ralph Denk has been put off the idea of prising Evenepoel away from Soudal-QuickStep, either by his travails at the Tour or by Florian Lipowitz’s assured debut.

It would certainly be foolish to rush to a snap judgement. Evenepoel’s value as a rider is not defined by his performance in this Tour, but by his body of work over the preceding five years. Even in winning the 2022 Vuelta, Evenepoel looked to have ample margin for improvement as a Grand Tour rider, and that remains the case now. He has improved since, but he remains very much a work in progress. 

Red Bull – or any other suitor – will still believe they can bring his raw talent a rung or two further up the ladder. That might not be enough to ever beat Pogačar in July, of course, but with the Slovenian and Vingegaard tied down at their current teams, Evenepoel remains the most bankable prospect out there, regardless of the past two weeks. 

In the meantime, Evenepoel will set about picking himself up, just as he did after previous setbacks, like his ill-starred Grand Tour debut at the 2021 Giro or his COVID-enforced abandon two years later.

Deep down, Evenepoel will hope to emulate Bernard Hinault in 1980 and bounce back from a Tour ordeal to win a most mountainous Worlds. In the Pogačar era, that won’t be straightforward, of course, but it certainly won’t be boring. With Evenepoel, it never is.