Victory the bare minimum for Evenepoel in Slovenia after Worlds disappointment

Wednesday’s edition of Het Laatste Nieuws cut straight to the point in its preview of the European Championships in Slovenia. “If Remco Evenepoel doesn’t win, he has failed,” read the headline. Tough crowd, but Evenepoel is surely used to it by now. 

In the absence of defending champion Tadej Pogačar, Mathieu van der Poel and Paul Seixas, among others, Evenepoel is the clear favourite to claim the title in Šenčur on Sunday. In HLN’s view, nothing other than victory will suffice against the opposition on show in Slovenia.

“Who will stand in his way?” the newspaper, asked before Primoz Roglič, Giulio Pellizzari and Romain Grégoire caught strays: “An old Slovenian, a bunch of unpredictable Italians or a few vague Frenchmen? Honestly, Evenepoel is his own biggest opponent.”

Then again, after showcasing his form over the previous two weekends, Evenepoel was the logical favourite for the World Championships road race in Montréal, but he fell short in a way that nobody could really have predicted beforehand.

Without Pogačar, the Worlds was always likely to be more open, which meant Evenepoel ran the obvious occupational hazards of missing the key move or being hemmed in by team duties. In the end, however, neither anticipated doomsday scenario materialised. Instead, Evenepoel simply seemed to suffer a jour sans at the worst possible moment, rolling home a disappointed 12th as Brandon McNulty carried off the rainbow jersey.

But it was still a curious kind of off day for Evenepoel, in that the lights never went out completely like they had done, for instance, at the 2025 Liège-Bastogne-Liège. In the final 70km in Canada, Evenepoel somehow contrived to keep getting dropped on climbs only to keep battling his way back on.

Evenepoel being Evenepoel, he even tried a defiant attack behind McNulty as the chasing group took the bell, but his problems found him again every time the road climbed on the final lap.

In the immediate aftermath, Evenpoel was content to write it off simply as a bad day at the office. “I realised pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to be my day to win,” Evenepoel said, noting that his sensations had felt off from the moment the race hit the first lap of the finishing circuit around Mount Royal Park.

But the postmortem was never going to be limited to a couple of quick interviews in the mixed zone. In Belgium, the short week between the Worlds and European Championships has been punctuated by all sorts of analyses and theories about how the Canadian expedition ended on such a flat note.

RTBF commentator Rodrigo Beenkens floated the idea that the Belgian camp had been struck by illness, noting subdued displays from Lotte Kopecky in the elite women’s race as well as from the elite men’s team and the under-23 squad.

“I’ll say it: there was a virus in the national team. Was it serious or not? It did have an impact. Some members of the support staff and junior riders were in quarantine,” Beenkens said. “Our two leaders both had an off day; that’s just bad luck, it can happen, but the other six…”

An alternative view is that Evenepoel’s chequered afternoon in Montreal was not entirely out of kilter with his staccato debut season at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. Although Evenepoel has amassed a dozen wins this year, including another time trial world title, Amstel Gold Race and two stages of the Tour de France, his climbing has often been the missing piece in the puzzle.

Evenepoel’s fast start at Red Bull, which included a podium at his surprise Tour of Flanders debut, was tempered by some underwhelming climbing displays at the UAE Tour and the Volta a Catalunya. His assured Amstel Gold Race win was followed by a distant third place at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and that persuaded Red Bull to pull him from racing until the Tour in favour of a series of training camps in May and June.

The best phase of Evenepoel’s year duly came on the biggest occasion in July, when he produced a series of strong rides in the high mountains in the second half of the Tour to take second overall behind Pogačar. But even in France, Evenepoel had visibly struggled to cope with sharp changes of pace on the climbs before hitting his stride towards the end of the second week. 

Whatever the precise cause of Evenepoel’s struggles at the Worlds, the Mount Royal circuit wasn’t the first time this year that he had found himself unable to match the accelerations of Seixas and Isaac del Toro. Food for thought once he begins to prepare for 2027, though he will have another chance to measure himself against the youngsters before then, when they all line up at Il Lombardia on October 10.

More pressingly, Evenepoel has an immediate opportunity to ride his Worlds disappointment out of his system this weekend in Slovenia. His two previous appearances in the European Championships road race have yielded two silver medals, behind a surprising Sonny Colbrelli in Trento in 2021 and behind a supersonic Tadej Pogačar in the Ardèche last year. 

This year’s race will also appeal to the completist in Evenepoel, given that the European road race title is the only available championship missing from his palmarès. The 26-year-old is already a two-time European time trial champion, and he has previously won both the road race and time trial at both the World and Belgian Championships.

But completing a full set is only part of the story here. Rightly or wrongly, the bar is always set higher for Evenepoel. The European Championships aren’t the Worlds, and victory here won’t obscure the disappointment of Montreal, but that won’t dampen Evenepoel’s motivation either.

No rider in the peloton is judged as relentlessly and remorselessly on his last race as Evenepoel, and he knows it. Winning is the bare minimum for Evenepoel in Slovenia, and he knows that too. Throughout his career, Evenepoel has made a habit of bouncing back quickly and emphatically from setbacks. Expect no different here.