There is, perhaps, no more demoralising feeling in a bike race than being caught by the rider who sets off behind you in a time trial. It is an unavoidable, horrible, harsh sign that you are off the pace. That the time you are so desperately trying to achieve has slipped through your fingers. That any hopes of a stage win, or a performance that would place you among the greats, are unequivocally over. There is nothing that can be changed, and the painful reality is that you have not done enough. It is this feeling that Remco Evenepoel suffered in stage 13 of the Tour de France.
“It was bad, but I think it was obvious that with a normal feeling I should end up in the top three on a day like this, but I was really bad,” the Soudal-Quick Step rider said after the race. He had finished in 12th place in the end, over two-and-a-half minutes behind the winner Tadej Pogačar and is now over seven minutes down on the race leader overall. Jonas Vingegaard had come up behind Evenepoel to overtake him in the final metres of the time trial as he approached the summit of the climb to Peyragudes, despite the Visma rider starting two minutes behind him.
“I have no idea [what happened],” Evenepoel said, his answers clipped and blunt – understandable for a rider who had suffered such disappointment. “I hope there will not be an explanation. Just a few days like this, hopefully not tomorrow. As I said, my start was pretty good, but after five minutes of the climb, I was feeling pretty bad, and I just could not keep pushing the power that I had to. A really bad performance from myself.”
Evenepoel can be so harsh on himself because of the high standards he has set in his career so far. His podium finish at the Tour de France last year set expectations regarding how he would follow this up the following year – would he arrive closer to the form of Pogačar and Vingegaard? Could he be the rider to disrupt their long-standing rivalry and even challenge for yellow himself? This is a man with a Vuelta a España victory to his name – getting caught by his two-minute man and being 12th in a time trial at the Tour de France was never on the plan.
“Nothing,” the time trial world champion said when asked about how it felt to watch his Danish competitor overtake him on stage 13. “I was already feeling pretty bad before that, with the pace I was riding, it was normal that he was going to pass me, just a really bad day, really bad performance of me, all the rest at this moment, I really don’t care.”
He may say that he doesn’t care, but Evenepoel is a winner, and under-performing has never been in his DNA. His curt responses and dejected body language are a sign of how much this means to him – it’s this drive for success which has got him so far. He still sits in third place on the general classification despite two days of disappointing performances, so all hope for a podium spot in Paris is not lost. Evenepoel has been down before and is no stranger to executing a comeback. How will he look forward to the next days in the mountains? It seems that, right now, it’s a bit too raw for the 25-year-old to think about that.
“I have no idea,” he stated when asked with an impassioned shrug of his heavy shoulders. The Tour de France can hurt as much as it can heal.
