After finishing third in Liège, Evenepoel disappeared without a trace. The photos on social media showed him during the retreat on Teide and if last year his approach to the Tour passed through the Dauphiné, this year it was decided not to let him race.
All things considered, figuring out the right route for the challenge against Pogacar is quite a puzzle: you try everything and in the end Tadej beats you anyway. Vingegaard won the Giro with half-condition, then he retreated to the mountains seeking freshness and metabolizing the Italian fatigue. Having won the Liège, Pogacar himself he ran and won Romandie and after the hill he lined up at the start of Tour de Suisse. Lipowitz, who has sworn allegiance to Evenepoel in case he proves stronger, faced the challenge with his head held high. with Pogacar in Romandie and now he's running in Slovenia. And then there's Seixas, who after Liège went to Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes Tour and retired after a crash in the eighth stage.
For Evenepoel they chose an approach without competitions, almost to preserve its freshness, with the unexpected change of plans and the replacement of coach Dan Lorang. In the absurd changeover at Lidl-Trek and in defiance of the outdated concept of professionalism, even the head of performance of Red Bull-Bora he thought about leaving the star athlete to move to the new houseHis contract ends on July 31, but the team thought it was appropriate to take Evenepoel off his hands.
Evenepoel and Catalunya
How is Evenepoel really doing? And why were his climbing performances so inferior to those of Vingegaard, Martinez, Lipowitz, and Paret Peintre at the Volta Catalunya?
Right after that series of unconvincing performances, team manager Klaas Lodewyck he let slip that in his opinion Remco's problem dated back to the crash in the first stages, because with the values he had shown he could have easily competed with Vingegaard. The sentence had been received with caution, given that even at UAE The Belgian's performance on the climbs had seemed anything but irresistible at the Tour. However Red Bull-Bora, who may want to protect their investment and claim their job, made a surprise move.
Although the German team does not release any data, a few days ago he published a video on YouTube in which he reveals the Belgian's data: it essentially demonstrates that the values to which Lodewyck referred actually existed.
The reveal video
In the video, shot on the eve of the Catalunya match, Evenepoel is told during two days of training on Teide. Between jokes with his entourage, during a training session at the threshold – designed to prepare him for prolonged uphill efforts – Dan Lorang himself enters the scene and reels off two facts: «At 420 watts – he tells him – we would be below the threshold, at 425 we are almost there».
It seems like a detail, but maybe it isn't. Those 425 watts represent Evenepoel's Functional Threshold Power (FTP).This is the power that the Belgian rider can sustain for approximately one hour. A decidedly high value, especially if you consider the weight of Remco, which during that retreat was hovering around 65 kilograms, bringing his FTP to 6,54 W/kg.
According to the site Watts2Win, on the Coll de Pall, the longest climb in Catalonia, Vingegaard averaged 6,2 W/kg for 38 minutes and after a stage with an elevation gain of over 4.000 meters. So on the one hand, Lodewyck was right, but numbers aren't enough. Evenepoel has already shown he's worthy of the Tour de France podium, but when factors like heat, fatigue, tactics, and the small unexpected events of the race come into play, things change. So much so that In the last two years his excellent performances in the high mountains have been limited.
Information already known?
Why release data like this? Isn't there a risk of revealing valuable information to rivals? It's probably confirmation that Evenepoel is feeling very well and the team wants to demonstrate, in this time of upheaval in the performance staff, that the work done is bearing fruit.
«I don't think it will make much difference – said analyst Benji Naesen, interviewed by Het Nieuwsblad – first of all because Racing values are often different from training valuesSecondly, because the teams already know almost everything about their opponents. Much can be reconstructed based on climb times and race footage. You can be sure, for example, that Visma-Lease a Bike knows exactly what a top-flight Pogacar is capable of. Pogacar's FTP is estimated to be around 6,7-6,8 W/kg, so Evenepoel can't match it yet..
«For the data to reveal the real value of an athlete – he continues – it would be useful to know for example how its power evolves as the effort continuesBased on this, you can identify a rider's weaknesses. A rider like Gall, for example, is very strong on long climbs, but much weaker on shorter ones like La Redoute. Knowing this, you can adapt your tactics accordingly.
A new coach
In the meantime, however, the technical guidance of Evenepoel has been entrusted to Tim Heemskerk, a Dutchman who left the Netherlands at the end of 2025 Visma-Lease a Bike where Vingegaard also followed since 2019In an interview last year with Ride Magazine, she explained how Jonas' shyness matched her own and that's why they immediately clicked.
Heemskerk was a good mountain biker. Already as a racer, He studied at the University of Maastricht, obtaining a degree in Sports Science.He lived for a time in Canada, racing mountain bikes and coaching young talents. He coached the US national cyclocross team and then became the coach of the Dutch national mountain bike team. Until In 2018 Merijn Zeeman, head of the technical area at Visma, offered him a job for them and the collaboration started in 2019.
The credo of Heemskerk, who says he left the Dutch team because it was no longer in line with his creativity, is the polarized training, which Evenepoel already did with Dan Lorang, doing lots of high-intensity work to raise your VO2max. Polarized training is often contrasted with Zone 2 training, the approach used by Pogacar, although Jorgenson (former Heemskerk athlete) has said on more than one occasion that the similarities are greater than the differences.
Another fixed point of his preparation philosophy is focused on the fatigue resistance: the ability to perform at peak lactate state.
The technicians' market
Evenepoel may have found the one he needs, as His limit so far has been his resistance when the going gets tough. In this coming and going of technical pictures, putting aside for a moment Evenepoel and his ambitions, it is clear how Money may not bring happiness, but it certainly makes a difference.. With this new cheeky and subtly arrogant way of acting, the new Lidl-Trek has taken away with a lot of euros the coach of Evenepoel (Dan Lorang) and the technical reference of Vingegaard (Grischa Niermann), who also lost his coach Heemskerk.
Wouldn't it be more correct to finish the seasons before implementing certain operations? And is it really that easy to find understanding between coaches from different cultures and champions? Or is there a risk, as happened with the failures of the first Sky and the first BMC, that all that money will only produce greater disorder?
