He’s still in the game. Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) came through an arduous stage 11 of the Tour de France with his second place overall still intact despite losing 25 seconds to top favourites Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease A Bike). And as the Belgian pointed out, time-wise, the size of his setback was smaller than in the Alps, too.
Evenepoel barely had to think about his choice of not trying to follow Pogačar when he went for it on the Puy Mary, he said, particularly given Pogačar’s teammate Adam Yates had laid down a searing acceleration to help the Slovenian achieve maximum liftoff.
The Belgian then gained added motivation when he managed to make contact with a struggling Primoz Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe). He even finished ahead of Roglič after the Bora racer was unlucky enough to crash in the last three kilometres, but the two were then awarded the same time, given Roglič’s fall had happened inside the ‘safety zone’.
“It was just a good stage. Maybe I didn’t feel at my absolute best; otherwise, I could have reacted a bit more strongly, but it's very positive,” Evenepoel said later.
"I'm still second overall and the guys behind me on GC lost even more time. It's a positive outcome.
"I tried to stay as close as possible to the two top names and if I lost 25 seconds, that’s less than what I lost in [the stage 4] finish in Valloire after the Galibier."
The Soudal-QuickStep leader said he had had no complaints about Roglič being given the same time as him at the finish, pointing out succinctly that “Rules are rule.”
However, he also said that Roglič looked to have been on the limit when the two were chasing after Vingegaard and Pogačar, a conclusion he reached after noticing that “some of Primoz's’ turns were quite short.”
"Remco could have tried to go with Pogačar, but then he risked blowing up and losing more time," Soudal-QuickStep manager Tom Steels pointed out to Sporza.be.
“We were a bit nervous when he was dropped by Pogačar, but then we saw everybody was on the limit.
"Remco did a great job. He kept himself under control and kept going within his limits, maybe even going a little bit over at times. And I think that in the last part of the stage,” - where Evenepoel and Roglič managed to reduce the gap from some 45 seconds on the leading duo to just 25 at the finish - “he was maybe even one of the strongest.”
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