Evenepoel knows what must improve to beat Pogacar: "It's up to my new coach to fix that

Just like at the World Championships, Remco Evenepoel ran into an unbeatable Tadej Pogacar at the European Championships. The Slovenian broke away on the longest climb of the day and then soloed 75 kilometers to the finish line. However, Evenepoel does see some positive takeaways. His new coach at Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, the Luxembourger Dan Lorang, is expected to help him overcome a relative weakness.

"It was the first time I was able to follow his attack for that long without being blown off, so that was positive," Evenepoel told Het Nieuwsblad. "But if I want to beat him in the future, I need to work on efforts like that. Going very hard for three to five minutes on a climb.”

“How do I improve on that? Fortunately, I am changing teams, and it’s up to my new coach to figure that out,” the double Olympic champion,” smiled. “I worked on it this summer, and in the past weeks and months I can feel I’m getting better at it. The key will be to keep training on this during the winter. I think the power data from this race will be very interesting for my coach to analyze. Then he will have to decide what kind of training I need. Because if I want to beat Pogacar in the future, I have to improve.”

Seixas’s Tactic
After the long climb, Evenepoel ended up in a small group with Paul Seixas, Christian Scaroni, and Juan Aysuo. However, the cooperation in this quartet was not optimal. “I heard every staff member from the French team on the roadside shouting at Seixas not to take their turns. That is a tactic, but primarily a strange one. Because of the lack of teamwork, the gap to Pogacar became too large to close. Although it was clear that Pogacar was the strongest rider in the race. (...) I get somewhat close, the rest are still very far behind."