Four days of racing remain at the UAE Tour. Still, even as early as this, Remco Evenepoel's next race at the Volta a Catalunya is already looking essential when it comes to determining where he stands among the GC favourites for the Tour de France.
Despite the Belgian’s cramps and frustration, his team refused to turn this bad day into something more dramatic. What exactly resulted in a two-minute time loss for the Belgian superstar on stage 3 to Jebel Mobrah doesn't matter so much in isolation; it just comes down to an off-day, but it's a missed chance to make a statement.
Before the race, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe's Chief of Sports, Zak Dempster, told Cyclingnews that "contrary to popular belief, you can actually reach a really high level without sitting on top of a mountain," and he was right. Evenepoel had dominated everything in his path as he started his season and time on his new team, notching up five wins from eight race days in Spain.
However, without the stimulus of an altitude camp in his legs, Evenepoel fell way short of the standard of his competitors on the brutal climb, which made a bang on its maiden appearance at the UAE Tour.
Antonio Tiberi emerged as the main man on the near-15km climb, with the Italian pacing his efforts better than anyone to hold off a late charge from Isaac del Toro. He was the winner on all fronts today, and it's a performance that Evenepoel will surely be envious of.
Now, it would be no surprise to see Evenepoel bounce back with a crushing victory on Jebel Hafeet on stage 6 – just look at how he responded to his soul-crushing defeat on the Col du Tourmalet at the Vuelta a España in 2023 – though wrestling back a 1:44 deficit to snatch red seems unlikely.
Evenepoel’s focus will quickly turn to how he can improve and ensure a day like this doesn't happen when the bigger appointments come around.
After completing the UAE Tour, Evenepoel won't wait long before he heads to Mount Teide in Tenerife to sharpen his tools and raise his level for the Ardennes Classics and then the Tour de France.
Upon his return from that trip, which he's doing alongside planned Tour co-leader, Florian Lipowitz, the Red Bull pair will head to the Volta a Catalunya, where a stacked GC field should await them.
Few riders in recent cycling history can lay down a statement performance like Evenepoel, with his crushing solo performances at Worlds in 2022 and the Paris Olympics two years later perhaps being the best examples.
But with this shock time loss now among his results for the season, the Belgian has to prove somewhere else that he can make the step up Red Bull are desperate for him to make, so that the Tour's podium can once again be in his sights.
Catalunya will feature some of the absolute best GC riders in the world: Jonas Vingegaard, João Almeida, Tom Pidcock, Felix Gall, Egan Bernal, Derek Gee-West – albeit not Pogačar. With time at altitude in his legs, Evenepoel will have and want to show that he can be as dominant as Pogačar.
He didn't hide in his pre-UAE press conference that winning more one-week WorldTour races is one goal for the season, after all, he hasn't won one since the UAE Tour back in 2023. In that time, Pogačar, who is very much the standard and perhaps the second-best rider of all time, has only raced four WorldTour one-week races, and he's won all of them.
That's not to say that Evenepoel matching that kind of consistency will win him the Tour de France. Comparing anyone to Pogačar is seemingly becoming more futile by the season – but winning one, and perhaps a few in dominant fashion, is the path Evenepoel rightly wants to be on.
As Klaas Lodewyck noted after the disappointing third stage to Cyclingnews, "We're in February," so there is ample time to find more performance for the big goals, and if he does reach the levels Red Bull believe he can, this performance on Jebel Mobrah could become nothing but a bump in the road, but there's certainly work to be done.
