Hold onto your hats: cycling’s oldest Classic, Liège-Bastogne-Liège is set to see two of its brightest young stars, Remco Evenepoel and Tadej Pogačar, do battle this Sunday in what is set to be one of the most keenly anticipated duels of the entire season.
A face-off between two of the most charismatic champions of the current peloton in a race as demanding and prestigious as Liège-Bastogne-Liège would be attractive enough no matter what. But the cycling planets have aligned in other ways to heighten the intensity of this particular battle.
Pogačar’s stunning sequence of success this Spring and Soudal-QuickStep’s desperate need for Evenepoel to save their disappointing Classics season at the last, just like last year, are just two of the additional factors deepening the drama.
But so too is the fact that Liège is Pogačar and Evenepoel’s first head-to-head encounter since the Belgian became world champion last September in Australia – and it’s almost certainly their only duel until Evenepoel puts his rainbow jersey on the line this summer.
The Tour de France is Pogačar’s overriding goal this year, but he has already done more in a few weeks this Spring than most riders manage in a career. With so many victories already, the question has become not so much if he will win, but who can stop him?
For Evenepoel, next month’s Giro d’Italia is a bigger prize than repeating at Liège-Bastogne-Liège. But as defending world champion, and racing on Belgian soil for the first time this season, Liège remains a hugely important landmark for Evenepoel in a year where wearing the rainbow jersey gives his achievements – and failures – added resonance. The chance to defeat Pogačar is, given his track record in 2023, an opportunity that he cannot afford to miss.
Both riders are victims of their own success, then. ‘Stop winning,’ was Evenepoel’s ironic plea to Pogačar back in March after the Slovenian’s devastating start to the season. But Pogačar paid no attention to Evenepoel’s request and instead continued to gobble up the victories.
Pogačar had already become the fourth rider in history and the first since Philippe Gilbert to take the Tour Flanders and Amstel Gold Race in the same year. Victory in Liège-Bastogne-Liège would put him on a par with Eddy Merckx in 1975, but not even the Cannibal himself won Paris-Nice and Flèche Wallonne that season as Pogačar has also done. Victory here would give Pogačar even greater…
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