After a fresh day of success for Soudal-QuickStep at the UAE Tour, race leader Remco Evenepoel says that even if the overall victory is the main goal of Sunday’s finale, another stage win is on his Middle East bucket list as well.
By Saturday evening, Soudal-QuickStep had snapped up three stages out of a possible six to date, two thanks to sprinter Tim Merlier and one in the team time trial, while Evenepoel remains in the lead for a fourth straight day.
But if Evenepoel will be defending his red leader’s jersey on a very different kind of terrain and backdrop to the skyscrapers of Abu Dhabi that mutely witnessed Merlier take his second win, the Belgian said afterwards he would try to go for both the stage and the overall on Sunday.
“Who knows, I wish you could tell me,” Evenepoel said, half-jokingly, when asked by one reporter what he thought could happen on the steeply rising slopes of Jebel Hafeet on Sunday afternoon.
“No, we’ll try to defend our jersey, it’s as simple as that. I think defending the jersey is our biggest objective, and winning the stage is the secondary one, but we’ll try to go for the double tomorrow.”
He also agreed that while the UAE Tour represented another building block in his progress towards the Giro d’Italia, the Middle East's only WorldTour race was a very significant goal in itself as well.
“Yes, because it’s a WorldTour one-week race, and so far, I haven’t won so many of those in the WorldTour, only the Tour de Pologne [in 2020].”
“For me, the Giro is the big objective, but for sure, I want to win some more WorldTour week-long races or at least get on the podium.
“And I think so far we’re doing well. But having the red jersey on the last day of the race, I think there’s no other option but trying to win it.”
Remco said that he could not be disappointed on Sunday if he was beaten by a stronger racer because “it will be like that.” But he promised that trying to win the stage was a definitive goal as well.
His time cushion of nine seconds over Luke Plapp (Ineos Grenadiers) was not huge, he pointed out, but it had its tactical advantages and allowed some room for manoeuvre. If Plapp won, for example, but Evenepoel claimed second at the same time, then even after the time bonuses had been added up, he would still be ahead overall.
“Better nine seconds ahead than nine seconds behind, then,” he said, “and we have a strong team that will control the race. We will try to go for it.”
Evenepoel recognised that given Soudal-QuickStep’s runaway domination of the race so far, with three jerseys - points, best young rider, and overall - in their power as well as those three stages, there was actually a danger of losing focus. And he cited Friday’s stage, where the squad narrowly avoided being caught out a little in the echelons late in the day, as one case in point.
“Yesterday [Friday], there was a small moment of not being focussed when we almost missed the echelon. Then, in the end, we could recover pretty easy, so that was not a big problem.”
“Then today, coming into the last two kilometres, there was this narrow chicane and 10 kilometres before that, I really told my teammates that I wanted to be up there in the first positions for it, just to be safe for the wide roads that came afterwards.
“I think after yesterday’s small mistake, we knew we had to stay focussed today as well. We didn’t come out of the front 20 or 30 positions all day, and we could also see that in the final result. And tomorrow, we’ll have to be focussed to try and win it.”
