Remco Evenepoel falls short in UAE Tour: "Still affected by yesterday's effort"
Remco Evenepoel has lost his red leader’s jersey in the UAE Tour. Even more, he has dropped out of the top ten in the general classification. The Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe leader cracked on the extremely steep Jebel Mobrah and lost significant time to his rivals. “I didn’t have a good feeling in my legs,” he said afterwards to Het Nieuwsblad.
“At the foot of the climb, I already felt cramps coming on, something I haven’t experienced much before,” Evenepoel began his story. “Maybe it was from yesterday’s effort, which hadn’t fully settled. When I had to let go, I had a really bad kilometer, but after that I managed to get through a bit. I often have moments like that early in the season on climbs like this, where I have a tough moment. But in any case, I just didn’t have a good feeling in my legs today.”
Evenepoel doesn’t want to blame his subpar performance on the heat. “I really kept drinking,” he said. “I think the effort from yesterday definitely hadn’t been digested. I also didn’t sleep well; I woke up because of the heat. But in the end, I can’t make any excuses.”
Ultimately, Evenepoel lost more than two minutes to stage winner Tiberi. In the overall standings, he now sits eleventh, one minute and 44 seconds behind the Italian. “Are my GC hopes gone here? I think I’m about a minute and a half behind. Maybe I can still do something nice to go for the stage win on Saturday.”
