Remco Evenepoel at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games
The double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel has for a time planned to have his retirement sports after his fall in training in December, he admitted Thursday at a press conference, on the eve of his return to competition on the Brabançonne arrow.
The 25 -year -old Belgian was unable to avoid a door of a mail vehicle when he trained on the outskirts of Brussels last December. He had suffered from fractures to a coast, to the right and right hand, from bruises to the lungs and a dislocation of a collarbone.
Tuesday, in an Instagram publication to announce his return, Remco Evenepoel had written that without his wife, he would have “probably stopped [sa] career”.
“Of course, injuries were quite severe,” he replied at a press conference on Thursday when he was asked if the retirement had crossed his mind. “With my shoulder, where all the muscles and ligaments were destroyed, the operation was heavy.”
“It was a difficult period, the second time in six months for the same shoulder. At one point, you start to doubt, will the shoulder be healthy again? Is it functional?”
The runner of the Sudal-Quick Step team, the third of the last Tour de France, is still suffering from a nerve at the shoulder.
“It has not yet been healed, there is part of the shoulder muscle that does not work at all at all,” he said. “If I were a tennis, volleyball or basketball player, my career would be over. Fortunately, I am a cyclist.”
The triple world champion, online race in 2022 and the time trial in 2023 and 2024, has already undergone several serious falls during his career, notably at the Tour de Lombardie 2020 or at the Tour of the Basque Country 2024.
“This is not the first big fall that I have, but this one, at the end of the offseason, was not easy knowing that everyone started to train and that I had to wait six additional weeks to do nothing at all,” said the winner of the Tour of Spain 2022.
Remco Evenepoel will be starting from the Brabançonne arrow on Friday before continuing on the Amstel Gold Race, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, which he won in 2022 and 2023.
Will he be able to beat the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar, on the podium of the first three monuments of the season?
“If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t be at the start,” he replied. “If the legs are there, why not?”
“I am not in my maximum form but I am still in good shape. Will be enough to beat (Tom) Pidcock or (Tadej) Pogacar who are in the form of their life? I do not know.”
(Written by Vincent Daheron, edited by Kate Entringer)
