Two minutes had already ticked by on the clock when Remco Evenepoel crossed the line at Lago Laceno on stage 4 of the Giro d’Italia. As planned, he had rid himself of both the maglia rosa and its associated post-stage duties, but even without those burdens, the world champion was never going to be able to drift anonymously back into civilian life.
It probably didn’t help that the only camouflage on hand was the long-sleeve rainbow jersey handed to him by a soigneur. Evenepoel was still in the process of covering his maglia rosa with it when a string of television cameras knotted tightly around him. “No, I’ve been giving interviews to you every day,” he said, shaking his head.
After finding a clearing, Evenepoel rode towards his Soudal-QuickStep team bus a kilometre or so away, leaving the constituent parts of the Remco-Media Complex little option but to jog after him and strike up camp outside. Aurélien Paret-Peintre won the stage, and Andreas Leknessund now leads the race, but Evenepoel remains the biggest show in town.
Ahead of the stage, Evenepoel had made it clear that he would welcome the chance to loan out his maglia rosa, but the tendering process here was surely more demanding than he and his team would have liked.
On a dank, chilly day in the southern Apennines, it took more than two hours of fierce attacking for an acceptable break to forge clear. On the final haul up the Colle Molella, meanwhile, Evenepoel’s teammates were distanced one by one, leaving the Belgian surprisingly isolated in the closing kilometres.
Still, Evenepoel finished safely in the same time as all of his key rivals, and he managed to pass off the lead to Leknessund while doing enough to finish the day in second place overall, just 28 seconds down on the DSM rider. The desired outcome, even if the process hadn’t been entirely smooth.
“It’s not us who decide, it’s the peloton that decides,” directeur sportif Klaas Lodewyck told the reporters assembled outside the bus. “Leknessund is a rider who can keep the jersey, and his team can control the jersey on the coming days. He’s the right rider for us.”
When it comes to Evenepoel coverage, no detail is too minor to overlook, and Lodewyck found himself fielding an earnest question about his rider’s decision to wear legwarmers for much of the stage. “There was rain today,” he said. “He chose to stay warm.”
Later, Lodewyck opted for a very generous interpretation of Evenepoel’s isolation on…
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