The same but different: Remco Evenepoel’s second solo attack in 12 months in Liège-Bastogne-Liège once again netted the Belgian victory in cycling’s oldest one-day race and once again ‘saved’ his team’s Spring Classics campaign.
But apart from being clad in World Champion’s kit and a year older, Evenepoel’s second Liège victory also comes barely a fortnight before he heads to the Giro d’Italia and as such, it acts as a massive morale booster to the Soudal-QuickStep star and his team before the next major challenge of his career.
Evenepoel was delighted, as he pointed out in his post-Liège interview with race TV, to be able to have claimed such a major victory win again in his first event of 2023 on home soil.
But apart from providing the inside line to the interviewer on his latest triumph in La Doyenne, his return to the Giro d’Italia in a bid to add a second Grand Tour to his second Monument was always going to come up for discussion. And Evenepoel agreed that winning in Liège was an ideal kind of omen - as well as an opportunity for a little indulgence.
“Last year, I had lots of time to enjoy the Liège victory, and this year I don’t,” he pointed out, “but I talked it through with the team nutritionist and asked if I won could I have some chips, and they said yes. So it’s frites on the menu this evening.”
As for managing to clinch a second triumph in Liège, Evenepoel said simply, “It’s amazing. It was a super long, hard race with difficult conditions, and there was the brutal crash Tadej [Pogačar] and some others had, I just hope they are ok.”
“I have to thank my team for this great victory, working for me from the start so hard. This victory belongs to them as well. And I’m just so happy to get two out of two here in Liège.”
Evenepoel’s team was forced to take almost full responsibility for the race after UAE Team Emirates logically switched strategies following Pogačar’s abandon. But they stepped up to the grid, with Julian Alaphilippe making a colossal effort on the Côte de Wanne and again, in lesser measure, on the Haut-Levée, Louis Vervaeke then taking over and Ilan Van Wilder giving Evenepoel the final support he needed before blasting up off on the Côte de la Redoute.
Evenepoel said that he had heard, rather than seen, Pogačar’s crash - “It was a horrible noise,” he related, before adding, “You never want that to happen to anybody. All my support and best wishes for a speedy recovery to him," he said.
“It’s really unfortunate that he had a crash like that, but that can happen to anybody, I’ve had a bad moment like that myself,” he pointed out, referring to his terrible accident in the 2020 Il Lombardia. “I just hope he gets through it OK and gets better.”
While similar visually to his 2022 success in Liège, Evenepoel pointed out that unexpected early attacks by Jumbo-Visma, most notably Jan Tratnik’s bridging across to the remnants of the break of the day when there were more than 80 kilometres to go, had meant the squad had had to dig deep.
But the team and he had come up trumps in the end and had been able to carry out their game plan of attacking over the top of the Côte de la Redoute, like last year, albeit with the additional flourish of dropping Pidcock, his most tenacious pursuer, on the small unclassified climb that followed.
“I knew I should go for it there because that was where I had to create the biggest difference on the chasers,” he said before concluding, “Crossing the finish line in this jersey was an amazing feeling.”
If a Pogačar victory would have seen the Slovenian enter the history books by becoming just the fifth rider to claim an Ardennes triple, Evenepoel's win is certainly worth more than a footnote in cycling's annals as well.
The Belgian is the first repeat winner of Liège since Michele Bartoli in 1997-1998, the first current World Champion to win a Monument since Peter Sagan in Paris-Roubaix in 2018, and the first current World Champion to win Liège since Moreno Argentin in 1987.
Should he now take the Giro d'Italia, he'd be the first to win Liège and then the Italian Grand Tour since Danilo di Luca in 2007. But for now, two Liège victories in a row is a remarkable achievement by anyone's standards.
