'Mistake of the day' - Evenepoel's Worlds challenge faded with bike change

Evenepoel was surprisingly distanced after trying to follow Pogačar’s decisive attack on Mont Kigali with 104km remaining, and it later emerged that he had broken his saddle after hitting a pothole ahead of the climb.

He managed to switch to a spare bike when the race next passed the pits, but Evenepoel was soon finding fault with the new machine. He began to cramp up on the next lap and he eventually stopped and waited for a replacement, convinced that the saddle was too high on his spare bike.

That decision proved a costly one, with Evenepoel losing at least 40 additional seconds as he waited on the roadside for the Belgian team car. He rode with considerably more confidence once aboard his third and final bike of the day, eventually powering away for second place, but his mechanic and cousin Dario Kloeck has maintained that the change shouldn’t have been necessary at all.

“The saddle on his first bike broke off after he rode into a pothole just before Mount Kigali,” Kloeck told Het Nieuwsblad.

“Remco rode a broken bike for a long time after that. The front of the saddle had dropped two centimetres, because the clamp broke off, and the saddle tilted down. There’s nothing you can do about that.”

Kloeck was at a loss to explain the second change, however, explaining that the spare bike’s measurements had precisely matched those of Evenepoel’s first-choice machine.

“We checked it three more times, but the saddle was the same height as on his other bike,” Kloeck said. “We’ll find out exactly what was wrong later, but I think it was mainly frustration. He lost a lot of time unnecessarily.”

The measurements are one thing, but Evenepoel’s perception was something else. In the mixed zone after the podium ceremony, he insisted that he hadn’t been sitting comfortably on his second bike and that caused his back to cramp up.

“I felt like it wasn’t sitting right at all,” Evenepoel said. “Normally, my saddle is always tilted down a little bit, and I felt like that saddle was completely level. I immediately started having lower back pain, which is also due to my past injuries.”

Evenepoel also defended his decision to stop at the roadside and wait for a replacement bike rather than ride with the chasing group until the Belgian team car managed to reach him.

“My back had completely cramped and I had to change immediately,” Evenepoel said. “But because so many riders who had been dropped, there was a barrage of the team cars, so the car was far behind the group.”

Evenepoel certainly appeared more comfortable aboard his third and final bike of the day. He rejoined the chasing group and then gradually whittled it down before attacking with 20km to go. Pogačar was out of reach by then, but Evenepoel took silver, 1:28 behind the Slovenian.

“I showed I was incredibly good once I got my position on the bike right again and I wasn't tensing up anymore,” Evenepoel said. “But those two chases were too much.”

Evenepoel’s predicament was complicated by the lack of race radios, and Cian Uijtdebroeks confessed that he thought the Belgian leader had abandoned after his second bike change.

“It was chaos, especially because we were racing without earpieces,” he told Het Nieuwsblad. “At one point, I even thought Remco might have dropped out of the race, but then he suddenly flew past.”

Sporza analyst and former Belgian national coach Jose De Cauwer maintained that Evenepoel had been too hasty in hopping off his bike to wait for a replacement at that precise spot

“You know that there will be dropped riders in that spot and the support car won’t be there, so you always have to keep going there, on the Kimihurura,” De Cauwer said. “If he had gone a kilometre further, the world might have looked different.”

The thought was echoed by former professional Jan Bakelants in his column in Het Laatste Nieuws, where he maintained that Evenepoel had allowed “peripheral matters” to cloud his judgement in that second bike change. “That was the mistake of the day,” he wrote.

Evenepoel comes away from Rwanda with a third time trial rainbow jersey and silver in the road race, and he will seek further titles this week, when he lines up in the time trial and road race at the European Championships.