Remco Evenepoel’s opting for the Giro d’Italia rather than the Tour de France next summer may have surprised a few cycling fans, and not just because the decision arrived several weeks earlier than expected.
These days, the young Belgian is always seemingly in with a good-to-very-good chance of victory no matter how hard the race. Following his Vuelta a España victory aged just 22, there can be little doubt that Evenepoel will make the Tour de France his biggest season target one day.
But even the quickest of looks at the arguments for and against the Tour and Giro in 2023 surely leads Evenepoel to pack his suitcase and head for Fossacesia on May 6, rather than making his way to Bilbao for the start of the Tour on July 1.
First and foremost, there are the routes, and it’s not just that Evenepoel could well end his first day at the 2023 Giro in the maglia rosa, courtesy of the race’s opening time trial.
On top of that, the fact that two further individual time trials make up a Giro course with a hefty 70 kilometres against the clock – three times that of the Tour – is always going to sound appealing to a rider with three World Championships TT podiums already in his palmarès.
That’s even more the case when Evenepoel’s first Grand Tour victory, in the Vuelta in September, was based in no small part around a TT stage win in Alicante.
There will be high mountains but in terms of what’s missing, in next year’s Giro there is no gravel stage of the kind that caused the first major dent in Evenepoel’s armour in the 2021 race.
Stepping stone
Secondly, Evenepoel’s team will likely view the Giro as an ideal stepping stone for the Belgian prior to taking on the Tour. He is only 22, has only ridden one-and-a-half Grand Tours to date, after all.
Riders like Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) are proving that these days that a lack of Grand Tour experience is not necessarily a handicap. But learning to handle the three-week ropes, both in terms of racing and his own physical capabilities, will certainly do Evenepoel no harm when it comes to tackling a Tour de France. At 22, he has ample time for that.
The 2023 Giro will likely prove an even steeper learning curve than the 2022 Vuelta
The value of gaining more Grand Tour experience is arguably even more true for his QuickStep-AlphaVinyl team, as they switch their overall focus towards goals that could well include a lot more GC responsibilities than before. The challenges of…
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