Barely 48 hours ago after he had decimated the field in the Critérium du Dauphiné time trial, the tables turned dramatically for Remco Evenepoel as the Soudal-QuickStep star suffered badly on the final summit finish on stage 6 and lost the overall lead.
Evenepoel was unable to respond to the attacks of Tadej Pogačar when the Slovenian opened up the throttle at the foot of the Côte de Domancy. Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) was briefly able to hold the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider's back wheel, for the Belgian, the pace proved too tough almost as soon as Pogačar attacked.
Having adopted his usual steady pacing strategy on the climbs rather than risk over-reacting then losing control completely, by the summit, Evenepoel was nearly two minutes back on the stage winner and 50 seconds down on Vingegaard.
That was not a total defeat, by any means, but it was enough of a loss to surely give the Belgian something a sense of deja vu from last year's Tour. It was 11 months ago his damage control climbing policy in the Pyrenees and Alps helped ensure he could take a remarkable third place in his debut in cycling's biggest race. But then as now, when the road steepened, the two top names remained out of his league.
Evenepoel said before the start that his crash on Thursday's sprint stage had not had any effect on his climbing, and when Visma-Lease a Bike blew the race apart on the second last ascent of the day, the Côte de Mont-Saxonnex, he continued to insist he felt good.
However, his difficult ascent of the Côte de Domancy and Côte de Cry looked as if he was in anything but a good place, and Soudal-QuickStep's notable lack of mountain support for the Belgian star on Friday likely did nothing to help him when he was isolated.
"I had felt great before," he told VTM Nieuws, but "maybe I just hadn’t recovered enough from the efforts on that penultimate climb. They also started that last climb as if the finish was after two kilometres."
UAE's blistering pace with Pavel Sivakov, Jhonatan Narváez and Tim Wellens was hardly easy to follow. But if Evenepoel was still trailing at the back of the Pogačar group when the last of the Slovenian's domestiques swung off, once Pogačar himself began to start firing on all cylinders, it was another story altogether.
“Pogacar was superior again,” Evenepoel said simply by way of explanation. “He showed once again that he is the best cyclist in the world.
"In the end, everyone exploded except for him, including Vingegaard.” As he put it to Nieuwsblad. "I think there was only one rider who deserved to win today.”
'Quieter and quieter'
Evenepoel said that he felt "quieter and quieter", a slightly poetic way of saying he felt less and less certain of his strength, as the kilometres ticked down. But rather than point to any particular reason for his fading power, he said he was a little baffled as to the exact cause.
"Maybe it's some after-effects of the fall. Or maybe I just don't have a super feeling yet. Or it was just a bad day. That can happen too.”
He was not overly troubled by his lack of teammates in the finale, he said, given that there were only seven riders together at the top of the hardest climb of the day, the Saxonnax.
"I had no one, but Pogačar had only one teammate with him. Florian Lipowitz [Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe] and [Enric] Mas [Movistar] were also alone," he pointed out to Nieuwsblad.
"So everyone was in the same situation. Moreover, in our team we have some guys who are returning from injury and others are still building their form. I'm not too worried, we'll just keep working."
It remained to be seen what Evenepoel, now fourth overall at 1:22, can achieve on the weekend's monster Alpine stages. While Friday's ride was not his best for sure comebacks after mountain defeats are definitely an inhouse speciality for the Belgian, too as he showed in the 2023 Vuelta a España after his disastrous day on the Tourmalet.
Or as Evenepoel put it in his usual upbeat way, “Tomorrow [Saturday] will be a new day. Maybe I'll have different legs, and we'll be on a [climbing] finale that will be completely different, too."
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