Remco Evenepoel: Five reasons why the runaway Quick-Step star has not won La Vuelta yet

When a football team goes into the break with a four-goal lead it’s hard seeing any way back for their opponents – especially when they’re a man down. Remco Evenepoel finds himself in a similar situation at the top of the deck in La Vuelta. We’re not even at the halfway point and the Belgian has a lead of 2’41” over his nearest rival, having consigned defending champion Primoz Roglic to his first ever loss in a Vuelta TT.

“My goodness,” Dan Lloyd said in The Breakaway about a man who was “head and shoulders above everyone else” in the Stage 10 time trial. “Unless he starts to crack in some way, there’s very little hope for anyone else in this race, given what we’ve seen today and in the rest of the race so far.”

For Australian pundit Robbie McEwen, the response to Carlton Kirby’s question of how anyone is expected to deal with Evenepoel in such form, was even starker.

“You hope that he blows up because if he stays at this level, he is going to obliterate the field by the time they get to Madrid. In fact, he has already done that today in this 30km test. He is the definition of a teardrop – he is so slippery through the wind on a time trial bike and has the power to push them long. And 48 seconds to the good of Primoz Roglic, who has never lost a time trial in Spain… The king is dead – long live the king! Remco is here.”

It would take a cataclysmic collapse or a comeback of monumental proportions for Evenepoel to lose this race now. But lose it he might. And here’s why…

We don’t know how he’ll perform in the third week

Ah, that old chestnut. If Evenepoel being unproven over three weeks has become something of a trope at this Vuelta, then there’s no denying the element of truth behind the seemingly lazy generalisation.

Put simply, the 22-year-old has, indeed, never completed a Grand Tour before, having only made it as far as Stage 17 in his debut Giro last year. After 10 stages of that Giro, Evenepoel was very much in the mix for the pink jersey – lurking in second place just 14 seconds behind the eventual winner, Egan Bernal.

The second week, however, became his undoing: distanced on the gravel stage to Montalcino, Evenepoel dropped to seventh and then shipped another minute and a half to Bernal on Monte Zoncolan. Two disastrous stages in the Dolomites then saw him fall to 27th place over an hour behind Bernal before Quick-Step stepped in quickly to pull their man to avoid further embarrassment or psychological damage.

Evenepoel Mark II may be an entirely different prospect to the upcoming talent who had his wings singed in that Giro. But the way he was found out last year serves as a stark reminder of how things can suddenly change for the worse in a three-week race.

Just two months ago, Pogacar was winning stages for fun in the opening week of the Tour, toying with his rivals while looking a dead-on certainty to win a third consecutive yellow jersey. The Slovenian showed that he could climb, sprint and TT – but still ended up ultimately losing to Jonas Vingegaard.

Pogacar was in total control – until he wasn’t. And he is a rider with a proven Tour track record.

Over the past decade, the likes of Simon Yates, Steven Kruijswijk and, most famously, Roglic have all contrived to lose Grand Tours they looked certain to win, while both Jai Hindley and Richard Carapaz have also conceded victories at the eleventh hour.

At any point in this Vuelta, Evenepoel could crack, lose 10 minutes, and have us thinking, “Of course that was always going to happen.” So, let’s suspend out judgement until he’s got through at least half of the remaining six summit finishes.

Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl don’t have the pedigree

The Belgian team are a classics- and sprint-focused power who for years struggled to accommodate even Dan Martin’s meagre general classification hopes. The arrival of Julian Alaphilippe has not changed that, the Frenchman’s long run in the Tour’s yellow jersey in 2019 coming down to his individual excellence rather than collective support.

If Joao Almeida decided to move away for a better chance of winning a Grand Tour, then Evenepoel’s prospects can only be a little better – even if he’s 10 times the rider than the man who took the wrong direction in the closing moments of Tuesday’s time trial.

The current situation in Spain is not just uncharted territory for Evenepoel; it’s a whole new world for Quick-Step. Even without any other riders joining Pieter Serry on the sidelines, there’s only so much work Alaphilippe, Fauso Masnada, Remi Cavagna et al. can do in the succession of mountain tests on the horizon.

Sporting directors Davide Bramati and Geert Van Bondt find themselves at the wheel of a vehicle for which they are unlicenced and have no experience of driving. Everything from here will be a stab in the dark and there’s no way of knowing how Quick-Step may respond, tactically, when forced to respond to the likes of Jumbo-Visma, Ineos Grenadiers, UAE Team Emirates and Movistar deep into the second and third weeks.

Altitude finish in Sierra Nevada could prove his undoing

By beating Simon Yates’s climbing record by 16 seconds on Les Praeres on Sunday, Evenepoel demonstrated that he is in better climbing nick than the Briton was when he won the Vuelta in 2018. He also busted a host of myths that have been doing the rounds – namely that he can’t perform in heat (the temperature was over 30 degrees), on steep gradients (at 25 per cent, this was the only real “rampa inhumana” of this Vuelta), or on back-to-back mountain stages (Evenepoel finished ahead of his rivals on both days in Asturias).

But there remain other perceived chinks in Evenepoel’s armour beyond those which he has already strengthened and the ongoing three-week-race cloud that refuses to part. The next trump card that could topple Evenepoel’s chances is his ability to perform on long, dragging climbs at altitude.

Thankfully for the man in red, the 77th edition of La Vuelta plays out on a very un-Vuelta-like route, only rising above the 2,000-metre mark on one occasion. But that single schlep up the Alto Hoya de la Mora to 2,510m in the Sierra Nevada in Stage 15 could be all that it takes.

Coming one day after a stage that concludes with the best part of 35km uphill to La Pandera, this mountainous third weekend in southern Spain could well prove to be a far bigger test than that which Evenepoel passed with flying colours in Asturias.

Evenepoel feeling the heat

The mercury was pushing 30 degrees on the Levante coast on Tuesday and it will only get hotter as the riders head inland as they traverse the south of Spain and then head into the centre before the finale in Madrid. Evenepoel is one of those riders who supposedly doesn’t like the heat too much – so that raises another eyebrow.

Who better than Sean Kelly to share his pearls of wisdom on the subject during Tuesday’s TT?

“The forecast looks like we’re going to be some warm weather conditions. That might have an effect as we go on into the race. We’re only starting the second week and have two more weeks to go – and there’s a lot of majorly difficult mountain stages to come.

“A lot of fatigue is setting in but with the heat for a number of days, that always cooks the riders. Some support it better than others – and that will be a question for Remco Evenepoel as well. He doesn’t like the really hot conditions, so that will be an interesting one.

“We need something to make the race more spicy because the way Evenepoel is riding in the past days on the mountain-top finishes – he’s just been riding away from everybody. But there’s a lot of question marks – the third week or a race, in a position that he is now, he hasn’t done that before. It makes it more difficult again.”

The spectre of Covid looms large

Quizzed after his time trial, Denmark’s Mads Pedersen, now almost guaranteed the green jersey now that Bennett has withdrawn, said: “It’s difficult. A lot of guys are getting Covid and we’re sitting there in the peloton spitting on each other… It’s a problem but if you look around here, people are standing one and a half metres from me without a mask on. So, it’s not just a problem in the peloton. It’s also all the other people around.”

Evenepoel has already lost his climbing domestique Serry because of a positive test. Should more team-mates be laid low, a hard task becomes even harder. And a red jersey won’t offer the race leader himself any protection from a disease which, lest we forget, stopped Canada’s Michael Woods from riding the very last stage of the Tour de France in July.

Then again, who are we kidding… Remco has it in the bag

Let’s be honest now. All this talk of Evenepoel not being able to reproduce his short stage race supremacy over three weeks simply because he tanked his debut Giro is pure guff. In May 2021, Evenepoel was still making his way back from his devastating Liege-Bastogne-Liege injury; the Giro was always a stepping-stone – a fact-finding mission, a chance to get experience and test the legs – rather than an actual target or a destination in itself.

Roglic is clearly still suffering from his Tour crash and his Jumbo-Visma team are vulnerable after the departures of Sepp Kuss and Edoardo Affini. Ineos, UAE and Movistar are divided forces filled with riders pursuing their own ambitions rather than rallying around one goal. What motivation does Richard Carapaz have to help Carlos Rodriguez when he’s going to be sporting EF Education-EastPost’s next zany limited-edition jersey next May at the Giro?

It’s a sign of how dominant Evenepoel has been – and, indeed, how much of a certainty his TT win in Alicante was – that the vast majority of this article was written well before the Belgian tyro rolled down the ramp to get his emphatic race of truth going in Elche.

The 22-year-old has proved himself to have the requisite skills and strength, the maturity and – for now – the team to keep his red dream alive. The only genuine reasons for him not to be standing on the top step in Madrid are the three Cs: crashes, calamity or Covid.

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