Analysis: Why Remco Evenepoel chose Giro d'Italia over Tour de France

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 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 defending a lead in the Vuelta a España, as they did brilliantly in 2022, can't be underrated, but some would say there’s a colossal difference between keeping control in a relatively gentle third week like the 2022 Vuelta, and fending off the attacks in the climbing colossi of the Dolomites and Alps. 

All round, then, the 2023 Giro will likely prove an even steeper learning curve than the 2022 Vuelta.

Riding the Giro d’Italia isn’t just a hugely prestigious goal in itself, then. As other riders and teams have shown in the past, it can, up to a point (but only up to a point), act as a test run for a future crack at the Tour de France in July.

Expectations of Belgium’s latest star will be scarily high, wherever he goes, and the small army of Belgian media that descended on Italy two years ago for Evenepoel’s Grand Tour debut will likely return in even greater numbers next May. But there’s a case for saying those expectations will not be as high, and with it the external pressure, as if Evenepoel were to start the Tour in July, particularly when wearing the rainbow jersey. 

Season schedule

The World Championship is also very possibly a factor in favour of Evenepoel’s Giro d’Italia choice. In 2023, the rescheduling of the World’s in August makes combining the Tour and defending his title a trickier jigsaw puzzle than if the rainbow jersey battle occurred in its usual September slot.

Speculation in the Flemish media that Evenepoel will ride the Belgian Nationals and Tour of Belgium next June had begun within minutes of Evenepoel’s decision to ride the Giro becoming public. But if that particular race program could be written off as wishful thinking at this point in time, what is beyond doubt is that Evenepoel will be able to enjoy 10 straight weeks of build-up for Glasgow, without the ‘minor concern’ of a Tour de France debut to shatter his focus.

What could be harder to work out, perhaps, is his promised participation in the Ardennes Classics, where he is defending champion in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. With less than two weeks between the Belgian Monument and the start of the Giro, time is tight, but time will tell.

Last but not least, while Evenepoel, at 22, can comfortably afford to move his Tour de France debut forward by 12 months, he already has some unfinished sporting business in the Giro d’Italia. A successful bid for pink, or even a solid performance that falls short of the victory, would allow Evenepoel to put his painfully uneven ride in the 2021 corsa rosa behind him. 

Even with all these arguments for racing the Giro, there will be those, like Pogačar, who believe Evenepoel should jump directly from the Vuelta to fighting for a first yellow jersey in July. 

"If I were World Champion, I’d want to do the Tour," Pogačar said earlier this year. And many would agree that the chance of riding the Tour wearing the rainbow jersey is hardly something to miss.

But rather than risk overstepping the mark too fast, it would seem Soudal-QuickStep, as Evenepoel's team will be called next year, have opted to play a longer game. The wisdom of that decision will only really emerge with the results of next year's races.