Remco Evenepoel: Pogacar’s success will give me motivation at the UAE Tour

Remco Evenepoel addressed Tadej Pogacar’s five wins in a week with some humour, but admitted it also provides ‘some motivation’, as he targets overall victory at the UAE Tour.

Pogačar is absent from his ‘home race’ of the UAE Tour and instead has been racking up the victories in Andalusia. His run of five victories in less than a week was impossible to ignore and Evenepoel teased the Slovenian on Instagram, pleading with him to “Stop winning, Thankyou.”

Pogačar sportingly replied: “It’s your turn now.” 

The social media exchange was in good fun but Evenepoel told a small group of media, including Cyclingnews, at the UAE Tour that Pogačar dominance at the Vuelta a Andalucia gave him extra motivation.

“It’s a very nice way to open your season, we also have to say the courses there suited him very well. Every stage, every finish was made for him,” Evenepoel suggested.

“Of course you still have to win the races, and even without all his victories, I came here to the UAE with some goals, new objectives. Maybe to go for a stage win and maybe end up on the podium of the GC, which is I think a very fair goal for me this week.”

“It’s always a good stimulus to see another top rider win so easily. You feel okay, it’s now up to us to try and come to his level. It’s not that it’s in my head all day, but it will help to give some motivation for this week’s training and racing.”

Pogačar recognised that compared with four years ago, when as a neo-pro he last raced the UAE Tour. and abandoned half way through because of a crash, he was in a very different place, one that he had no idea that he would attain in the sport.

“I came here with the idea of winning, but that was after three weeks of being a pro and after that race I realised that it was going to be very hard to come back and to try to win it,” he explained.

“To be back after four years away, with a special jersey and a lot of victories to my name, I would never have thought that was going to happen.”

Asked if in that time cycling had become more of a passion or a job, Evenepoel plumped squarely for the former, saying that his attitude had changed with time because “in my early years I saw it too much as a job.”

“I felt obliged to do training, obliged to train like the other guys, but now my racing runs under its own steam. I did 12 days training in Spain recently. The first five days were in the rain and in my first years I’d have refused to do that. But now I did four and half, five, then six hours training in the rain and at a maximum of eight degrees so it was pretty cold. That’s because I see cycling as very different to the beginning of my career.”

The other point of training in the rain, he said, was that he knew all too well that the Giro d’Italia can often be held in “super-bad weather for a few days or a whole race. So it’s like I get motivated by different things or events, different kinds of racing.”

From football to World Champion

In a revealing interview, Evenepoel added that his earliest motivation to change to cycling had arisen from a dislike of how he viewed football, which he played from age four to 17. 

“Maybe I started too early, and that’s the biggest reason why I changed. I did like football but it was all about money and agents. I started to get a bit angry and the way that little world decided a lot in the sport.”

He accepts that football and cycling are growing increasingly similar, as cycling becomes a bigger sport and he has become one of the biggest names in the peloton.  

He believes his generation’s desire to attack earlier and race more aggressively has attracted a new, bigger audience to cycling. 

“I think more and more people are watching the sport because of the way races are ridden nowadays. Whereas before you’d only wait to watch the last hour because that was when everything happened, now you never know, things can happen at 100 kilometres from the start,” he said.

“At the same time, jerseys and bikes are looking good, and it’s all coming closer to football, it’s getting more chic and expensive. That’s why it gets more attention. Football’s the top sport, but cycling’s getting closer.”

All of which brings Evenepoel, as one of the highest profile stars of the sport, back to the UAE Tour and what he wants to achieve here.

It is only his second race of the season, but which is also his second last stage race before the Giro d’Italia. Evenepoel made his season dubu at the Vuelta a San Juan Internacional and will ride the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya in late March, train at altitude in April and then ride Liege-Bastogne-Liege before the Giro d’Italia starts on May 6.

“I would like to take a step forward compared to Argentina,” Evenepoel said after his seventh place overall in San Juan. “It felt a bit strange to fly home from there without a prize.”

Evenepoel’s best chances to emerge in the overall classification will be on the two uphill finishes at stage 3 and stage 7, while the stage 2 team time trial and any days in the desert cross winds will be important too. 

Pogačar may be absent but UAE Team have Adam Yates, Jay Vine and Brandon McNulty in their line-up. 

“The podium is a good goal," Evenepoel said cautiously, while also keen to take his first win in the world champion’s rainbow jersey.   

“I feel good but I’m still only running at 90 percent of my ability. A lot will depend on the team time trial. The main thing is not to get sick or crash, like when I did in 2019, injuring my arm. An injury like that would not be a huge deal in terms of the Giro, but a broken arm would be.”