Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel lived up to expectations and more on stage 1 of the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana as the QuickStep-AlphaVinyl star blasted away from the opposition for victory in his first race of the season in Spain.
Roughly a kilometre from the summit of the tougher-than-anticipated Torralba del Pinar climb, Evenepoel surged out of a shattering front group and quickly established a gap of 15 seconds. That proved to be more than enough to claim his and his team’s first win of 2022 and to place himself at the head of the overall classification.
As Bahrain Victorious leader Matej Mohoric, himself a noteworthy ninth on the stage after some impressively hard work by his squad mid-way on the climb, told Cyclingnews afterwards, “now he’s the man to beat.”
Just as the Giro d’Italia last year saw a mass descent of Belgian journalists to follow, this year’s Valenciana has seen a notable spike in interest in the Flemish media, with Het Nieuwsblad surely dedicating what is a record three pages to its presentation of the Spanish stage race.
As for Evenepoel himself, resplendent in the yellow jersey of leader as he sat perched on a stool for interviews in the small media tent next to the finish, the Belgian said he had no idea of what to expect at the end of the stage.
“I really didn’t know what the final would be like because we didn’t know [what] the climb was like,” Evenepoel told journalists.
“The GPS and Veloviewer said it was a bit flat in some parts” - as was true roughly half-way up - "but in the end it didn’t really feel flat. I knew that the part where the attacks started just before the top was the hardest bit of it all.”
Rarely out of the top 10 on the opening phases of a climb with a bewildering variety of gradients ranging from a slight downhill to around 10 per cent in places, Evenepoel said he took encouragement from feeling so comfortable early on the ascent. But later on even he suffered a bit with the gap rising fast to 15 seconds, and then staying the same all the way to the finish.
“It was quite hard to keep the pace going in the final because I went all out in that attack,” Evenepoel explained. “We knew that if you had a gap at the top then they wouldn’t get back easily on the plateau and top.
“So I just went all out, all out. I could really feel my legs burning. But the team supported and trusted me to finish it off and I’m really happy I can finish it off with a nice victory.”
QuickStep-AlphaVinyl were cautiously optimistic about Evenepoel’s chances of being - as one Flemish journalist made sure Evenepoel realised on his pre-race press conference on Tuesday - the first Belgian to win the Comunitat Valenciana race since one Eddy Merckx more than half a century ago.
“It’s not over, there’s still four days left,” sports director Tom Steels told Cyclingnews. “It’s never over, eh? This is cycling, and there’s still a hard climb the day after tomorrow (Friday). He’s riding well, so we’ll see.”
Steels confirmed Evenepoel’s explanation of the final climb by saying in the team meeting beforehand they had discussed his chances and Evenepoel had been confident, but “that says a lot and it doesn't say anything. And it was a very hard race. We were hoping for a win, but you never know how the competition is going to be until the legs speak.
“The whole team controlled the race well throughout the day, together with Movistar and that’s good to give us all confidence. But now Friday is the key day.”
