Pogacar stuns Red Bull at Tour de France training camp - ‘We thought he was bluffing’

Van Gils has just returned from 24 days at altitude in Spain, where he trained alongside Remco Evenepoel, Gianni Vermeersch and Tim van Dijke. Later in the camp, Florian Lipowitz, Primož Roglič and Jan Tratnik joined the group as Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe fine-tuned its Tour de France plans around Evenepoel and Lipowitz.

For Van Gils, the camp was also personal. The 26-year-old Belgian is working his way back after breaking his pelvis in a crash with Jan Christen (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) at the Clásica Jaén in February. He has barely raced this season, but says the Sierra Nevada block has given him confidence that he is ready to fight for a place in the team’s Tour selection.

“It was the best altitude camp of my career so far,” Van Gils told HLN. “It was the ideal mix of good accommodation, perfect weather, a good atmosphere and solid training, but not too much. I am also really sharp in terms of weight.”

The training was serious, but the mood inside the Red Bull group was light. Evenepoel often decided the route, although Van Gils joked that his team mate’s definition of an easy day could be misleading.

“Remco always chose the route and would often say at breakfast: ‘It is a quick loop today.’ Then he was talking about a five and a half hour ride, but it was 200 kilometres and in reality quickly became six hours.”

Still, Van Gils insists the group did not overdo it. The longer endurance rides were completed together, while the harder interval work was done individually. Instead of the usual rhythm of three training days followed by recovery, the riders worked in blocks of two days on and one day off.

That structure helped Van Gils absorb the workload, something he says has not always been easy for him after altitude camps in the past.

“In previous years I sometimes had trouble digesting an altitude camp,” he said. “But in the last training sessions at sea level I did not feel any problems during the intervals.

The camp also offered a glimpse into the dynamic Red Bull hope to take into the Tour. Van Gils described a professional environment with plenty of room for humour and rivalry. He and Evenepoel even pushed each other during short uphill sprints.

“Remco and I wound each other up during the uphill sprints,” Van Gils said. “When we did individual sprints at altitude, we compared our power afterwards. Whoever pushed the fewest watts tried to beat the other in the next sprint.”

Asked whether he could beat Evenepoel in such a sprint, Van Gils laughed.

“We did it once during the altitude camp. Remco won. He is pretty fast.

But the most striking performance Van Gils saw in Sierra Nevada did not come from inside his own team. With much of the peloton training in the same area, Red Bull occasionally crossed paths with rivals. One rider stood out immediately.

“Tadej [Pogačar] passed us a few times, and he was going very fast,” Van Gils said.

The sight of Pogačar climbing past was enough to make the Red Bull riders question what they had just seen.

“We really were not riding slowly, but Tadej went uphill extremely hard,” Van Gils said. “At first we thought he was doing it to bluff a little and that he had hidden in the bushes a few corners later. But when we got to the top, we saw him again. So it really was just a normal climbing effort for him.”

Van Gils also noted how lean the UAE Team Emirates leader looked.

“I thought he looked very thin,” he said.

For Red Bull, the sight of Pogačar in full flow only underlined the scale of the task ahead. Evenepoel is preparing for his first Tour de France with the team, Lipowitz is expected to play a major role in the general classification group and Van Gils hopes to be part of the support structure around them.

He sees himself not only as a rider who can help on the road, but also as someone who can bind the group together.

“I get along very well with both Remco and Lipo,” Van Gils said. “And I can also help those two get along well with each other.”

According to Van Gils, that matters more than ever in a Tour team.

“Teams now focus much more on how they can create a good group,” he said. “They no longer only look at putting the best individuals together. I see myself a little bit as the glue in the Tour team.”

His role in July is already being discussed. In the mountain stages, Van Gils could be sent into breakaways, chase his own opportunities or serve as a satellite rider for Evenepoel and Lipowitz. He also expects to be important in the opening days in Barcelona, especially on stage two, which finishes on Montjuïc.

“That stage should suit Remco very well,” Van Gils said. “I expect time gaps between the general classification riders there. It will be my job to drop Remco off at the right moment. He can win that stage.”