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Two out of two. For the second day running in the UAE Tour Soudal-QuickStep hit the bullseye in the race, with Remco Evenepoel taking another key step in the GC battle for the overall as he moved up to second overall.
Soudal-QuickStep had said pre-stage their goal was a top three placing in the vital high-speed team time trial around Khalifa Port, but finally they could secure a narrow triumph over EF Education-Easy Post by the bare minimum of one second.
Evenepoel has only gained three seconds over Ineos Grenadiers and his young Australian rival Luke Plapp, while Bahrain Victorious and Pello Bilbao are still very much a GC factor after only losing four seconds.
But with no other GC rivals at a minute or less, the team time trial has continued the clean-out of the overall classification begun by Monday’s spectacular echelon stage. And in the two mountain stages to come, Evenepoel remains very much on course to challenge for the overall lead.
“We came here with some big goals, to have a good TTT was one of them but to win it – we could only dream about it,” Evenepoel said afterwards.
Evenepoel recognised that the TTT itself had been a race of two halves, after losing 10 seconds in the first part of the course to the fastest team EF at the mid-way checkpoint before powering things up on the equally second section.
“It was actually a difficult course to pace because we had a headwind-tailwind-headwind and then tailwind again,” Evenepoel said on another day with midday temperatures in the high 20s also challenging the riders.
“So we had to put down a high speed in the headwind sections and then on the tailwinds we went all out without thinking too much.”
“In that last part, I had to do very long pulls because I had the biggest chainring on the bike and it was up to me to bring the train up to a very high speed. At one point we were riding at 70 or 71kph. But that was the best strategy to win.”
Asked to explain where riders suffer the most physically during a team time trial, Evenpoel argued, “I’d say it hurts the most in your back. That’s because the guy that swings off has to begin again. And when you have a guy in the front who really wants to bring the speed up, even when it’s steady, you [the rider that swings off] have to go from a lower speed to a higher one and that five or 10 seconds, accelerating to get back into the train, that’s when it hurts the most.”
However, he pointed out that in Soudal-QuickStep’s case, they had steadily…
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