Great disappointment for Remco Evenepoel after his withdrawal from the Tour de France. The leader of Soudal Quick-Step spoke to the press by the team bus after the fourteenth stage. "It just didn’t work, there was nothing there," he told, among others, WielerFlits.
"Having an off day once in a while is normal. But three bad days in a row is not something I’m used to, so stopping was the best option. Actually, it was Klaas (team director Klaas Lodewyck, ed.) who told me to quit," said Evenepoel, who is still searching for the reason behind his withdrawal. "No idea. I can’t say anything about it yet. We’re going to investigate and review it now. Everyone knows I had a terribly bad winter. But we’ll take another look at everything. Maybe there’s something going on inside my body. I can’t point to anything specifically at this moment."
Before the start of the fourteenth stage, Evenepoel’s coach Koen Pelgrim had already mentioned that his rider couldn’t complete all training sessions preparing for the Tour due to poor recovery after the Critérium du Dauphiné. "I basically couldn’t do any training. I couldn’t handle any intensity. Fatigue, the body just not being good enough this year, it could be anything... I can’t specify one single cause."
Was it really a good idea to ride the Tour with such preparation? "I won a stage and was in third place for a long time. Until today, things still looked fairly okay, but today it just didn’t work at all. I could have just ridden in with the gruppetto and continued, but who knows — I might have dragged this bad feeling further into my body and then maybe wouldn’t be there in September either."
