Evenepoel gets a helping hand, but the Tour cannot be Pogacar-proofed

In 2026, ASO attempted to build a Tour ‘in crescendo’ in the hope that the race for yellow would stay alive until the late Alpe d’Huez doubleheader. But that aspiration was undone, at least in part, by the organiser’s insistence on trying to have its cake and eat it by punctuating the route with early excitement too. 

Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates-XRG immediately seized on the opportunity, ending the Tour as a contest on the Tourmalet on just the sixth day of racing. From there, it was the same old procession until Paris. Back to the drawing board. 

In truth, the ‘solution’ – and we use that term loosely – was obvious. Pogačar is the best climber in the peloton, the best puncheur in the peloton and the best flat-out bike racer in the peloton, meaning that hazards like cobbles and crosswinds are only likely to play in his favour.

The closest thing to a ‘weakness’ – and we use that term even more loosely – in his armoury is time trialling. It’s the one aspect of cycling where there is another rider demonstrably better than Pogačar, and that rider happens to be the man who placed second overall in 2026.

With Pogačar now clearly a rung or more above Jonas Vingegaard and with Paul Seixas still developing, albeit rapidly, Remco Evenepoel thus comes into focus as a natural foil for the Slovenian as he seeks a record-breaking sixth win in Paris.

For 2027, route designer Thierry Gouvenou has broken the emergency glass and reached for time trials, placing two long and largely flat individual tests on the route for the first time in fifteen years. 

The total amount of individual time trialling – 71km – is the most since Bradley Wiggins won the Tour in 2012, but the distribution of the time trials is almost as important as the distance. Crucially, the 38km test in the Loire valley on stage 7 comes before the Tour tackles any mountains of note. 

All sorts of pitfalls can befall a rider in the fraught opening days of the Tour, of course, but all things being equal, Evenepoel will surely expect to be in yellow ahead of the first mountaintop rendezvous on the Grand Colombier two days later.

That certainly appears to be ASO’s intention. After the processions of the past three years, the Tour organiser clearly wants to engineer a scenario where Pogačar is forced into a remontada to overcome a lead, remembering the drama that ensued when he was put on the ropes by Jonas Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023.

It also helps that Evenepoel is arguably the most compelling personality in the entire peloton, and ASO would see no harm in putting him front and centre for at least a few days. The Tour isn’t just a bike race; it’s also a soap opera. The appeal of a yellow jersey with real main character energy is obvious. Evenepoel is basically incapable of giving a bland interview and the race lead wouldn’t change that one jot. 

And, lest we forget, Evenepoel might not be the only beneficiary of the additional time trialling miles. Seixas defied all expectations with bronze in the World Championships time trial, and there’s every chance the 20-year-old will have progressed still further in the discipline by next July.

Although the second week of the Tour features a taster of the demanding 2027 Worlds route and a tough Alpine leg to Les Saisies, ASO have tried to dose the climbing carefully, eager to maintain suspense for as long as possible. There is a rugged day to Mende on the third weekend, but if Evenepoel can replicate his 2026 levels, he has another clear chance to put Pogačar on the back foot after the Tour’s final rest day, with a 33km time trial around Toulouse on stage 16.

On the eve of Il Lombardia two weeks ago, Evenepoel confessed that the Giro d’Italia was an option for 2027 and that he would only make a decision after the routes had been published. Even if new Giro director Luca Guercilena unveils a route redolent of the Moser-Saronni era on November 3, we can take it as read that Evenepoel’s 2027 season will be built squarely around a Tour route that looks to have been tailored to keep him in the match for as long as possible.

Even before the lights went up in the Palais des Congrès on Thursday, Tour director Christian Prudhomme was defending himself against the idea that ASO is trying to prevent Pogačar from winning a record sixth yellow jersey.

The charge is unfair. In truth, Prudhomme knows that there is little his organisation could do to ‘Pogačar-proof’ the Tour. If the past three editions had been run as a series of criteriums, the Slovenian would still have won, and it’s not as if his time trialling is a bona fide weakness. 

Pogačar won his first Tour with a devastating win in the hybrid time trial to La Planche des Belles Filles in 2020, after all, and after some wobbles against the watch in 2023, he has been very solid in the discipline since coming under the tutelage of coach Javier Sola that winter.

Like everyone else, Pogačar will also train to the demands of the 2027 route, and that extra work on his time trial bike might bring him closer than expected to Evenepoel in that stage 7 test. 

Assuming Pogačar recovers fully from the crash that forced him out of the Vuelta a España and assuming he hits anything like the heights of the past three years, he will set out from Edinburgh on July 2 as the clear favourite for overall victory.

And even if Pogačar were to fall short in his tilt at the record in July, there is certainly no guarantee that the time trials would be his downfall or that Evenepoel would be the beneficiary. History tells us that eras of Tour dominance tend to end suddenly and in unexpected ways. 

When Miguel Induráin was chasing a record sixth Tour in 1996, director Jean-Marie Leblanc devised a route that seemed to have been drawn up with home favourite Laurent Jalabert in mind. The second week featured a succession of rugged days in the Massif Central that served as an open invitation to Jalabert and his ONCE team to replicate their aggression from the previous July.

But by the time the Tour reached the Massif Central that year, Jalabert had already abandoned through illness while Induráin’s Tour reign had already begun to collapse when he cracked shockingly and spectacularly on the climb to Les Arcs. The largely unheralded Bjarne Riis rode into Paris in yellow.

The old truism usually holds firm: the riders (and their circumstances) make the race. Evenepoel has been given a helping hand in the battle against Pogačar, but that won’t necessarily be the story of the 2027 Tour. 

Seixas, as his soaring triumph at Il Lombardia showed, is still developing at an astonishing rate, and he will like what he sees of this route. Vingegaard, meanwhile, hasn’t gone away. If he hadn’t crashed out last July, he likely would have placed in the top two for a sixth straight year, and he will be diligent in preparing for the specific tests on the course.

But the road to victory in Paris ultimately doesn’t run through the time trials or even through the mammoth mountain legs to Les Saisies and the Col du Portet. It still runs through Pogačar, and no amount of Tadej-proofing can change that.