Evenepoel-Lipowitz tension was always part of Red Bull's Tour equation

The latest instalment of the story that never stops giving had seen Evenepoel very publicly call out his Red Bull co-leader Florian Lipowitz for failing to lead him out in the sprint for third place at Gavarnie-Gèdre, almost three minutes behind the unassailable Pogačar.

Evenepoel was beaten to third by Pogačar’s UAE teammate Isaac del Toro, and he could scarcely hide his annoyance afterwards. It wasn’t exactly Roberto Visentini at Sappada, but he still spoke with a candour that was striking in today’s era of media-trained diplomacy. 

“I asked for a lead-out and didn’t get one,” Evenepoel said. “Yes, I was angry, and rightly so. In the Volta a Catalunya, I led the way for him for 30 kilometres. I asked him to lead for one kilometre, but that didn’t happen. That made me angry, and we’ll need to have a proper discussion about it this evening.”

Over the past decade, press officers have developed the habit of recording their riders’ interviews for use in their own press releases, but we can only assume Red Bull’s media team opted against sending those particular quotes out into the ether. No matter, Evenepoel was speaking to a live television audience in Belgium, so the cat was already out of the bag. 

Even so, it won’t have shocked anyone that relations between Red Bull’s leadership duo are not entirely as harmonious as the official, soft-focus version presented by the team’s PR machine over the preceding six months. 

Daniel Benson pointed out on Friday that the Austrian soft drink concern’s marketing publication, The Red Bulletin, had described the pair as “having clicked like two old friends” during a training camp on Mount Teide. In that light, Evenepoel’s outburst on Thursday felt like a compelling argument for the value of independent media in an age of PR spin. 

It also wasn’t altogether surprising. Evenepoel, in both good days and bad, is generally one of the sport’s truth tellers. For better or for ill, he tends to give straight answers to straight questions – which, incidentally, is precisely why so many journalists in Belgium were so irked by the subterfuge over his Tour of Flanders participation this spring. The feeling was that Red Bull’s repeated denials – not to mention their juvenile glee over supposedly ‘fooling’ the media – was completely beneath Evenepoel.

Red Bull quickly scrambled to make light of the episode. On the team’s in-house podcast, manager Ralph Denk claimed that the incident was “being made out to be bigger than it actually was,” insisting that Evenepoel and Lipowitz had “laughed” together at dinner.

On Friday morning, head of sports Zak Dempster approached the media scrum with his usual calm, and he looked to put the incident in its proper perspective without sugarcoating it unduly. “It’s the heat of the moment and top-level sport,” he said. “Everyone is human, and that’s it.”

Evenepoel’s very human vulnerabilities are precisely what make him such a fascinating figure. He is firmly among the peloton’s alien talents, but his Achilles heel always seems a touch more exposed than those of Pogačar, Vingegaard or Van der Poel. And in his media dealings, he is far more likely to show his true feelings than any of that trio.

That was in evidence again on Friday, where Evenepoel made it clear that he was in no mood to revisit his spat with Lipowitz. “Everything has been discussed and clarified. We can move on,” Evenepoel told the Belgian media, and he couldn’t mask his irritation when asked what he had said to Lipowitz at the hotel: “You don’t need to know that. I don’t have to tell you everything, otherwise nothing will be private anymore. The past is the past. Now we look forward.”

Evenepoel has a point. Although the sparks at Red Bull have generated plenty of column inches over the past 24 hours, there’s nothing to suggest that this will make any material difference to their bottom line at the end of the Tour. 

A degree of internal competition was always inevitable once Red Bull announced that Evenepoel and Lipowitz would line up at the Tour as co-leaders. They wouldn’t be the riders they are if they weren’t each harbouring ambitions of beating the other to a place on the podium in Paris. That is, as Dempster would have it, simply a reality of top-level sport.

Dual-pronged leadership structures have always generated intrigue at the Tour, but it’s also notable that some of the most publicly bitter internecine struggles – LeMond and Hinault, Wiggins and Froome, Contador and Armstrong – have ended with a yellow jersey. 

The maillot jaune is already far beyond the reach of the Red Bull duo and everybody else, of course, but there’s no reason why at least one of the pair can’t reach the podium in Paris – and the chances are it won’t even be necessary for one of them to sacrifice himself for the other. 

Twelve months ago, after all, Primož Roglič was hardly the most diligent helper in Lipowitz’s retinue in the third week of the Tour. But while his attacking cameos didn’t exactly dovetail with Lipowitz’s podium challenge, they also didn’t stop him from reaching Paris in third overall. 

The road has a habit of deciding these things over three weeks. As this Tour draws on, the hierarchy at Red Bull will gradually make itself clear, and both Evenepoel (fourth at 3:30) and Lipowitz (seventh at 4:00) know that. 

Evenepoel arrived at this Tour seemingly leaner than ever before, and he looked sharper than Lipowitz in the opening skirmishes. On the Tourmalet, by contrast, Lipowitz was climbing marginally better than his co-leader, but Evenepoel dosed his own effort smartly, cresting the summit just 20 seconds behind him before catching up on the descent.

On a relatively amenable route and with a flat time trial at the start of the third week, Evenepoel still has ample reason to believe in a podium finish at this Tour. Lipowitz, meanwhile, will be buoyed by his Tourmalet showing after a shakier start. 

But however it plays out, a dash of internal rivalry isn’t necessarily an impediment for either man. And, above all, it would be a shame for the rest of us if Evenepoel were to start filtering his opinions now.