"I want to be better than him" - Remco Evenepoel wants to beat Tadej Pogacar and has clear ambition of winning Tour de France

Remco Evenepoel is a rider without limits on his ambitions - within common sense - and he believes his move to Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe will trigger an improvement. That is what he seeks, so he can reach the level of Tadej Pogacar at some point, and also win a Tour de France.

“If everything keeps going well and if I can have a really good winter, good training camps and the points I’m looking for in the races in spring," Evenepoel shared with Sporza. “If I can show in Catalunya that I’m there to win, like I was in 2023 on the way to the Giro, then I definitely think I can reach that level.”

Evenepoel outlined a simple season, without making his debut in the spring classics and without starting the Giro d'Italia, in which the route seemingly fit him better than the Tour de France. He wants a year without injuries or illnesses hampering him, and he wants to work on his ultimate goal of conquering the Grand Boucle one day.

He is making his season debut at the Challenge Mallorca in the TTT event, which the team will use to prepare for the Tour de France. He will then race the Volta a Comunitat Valenciana, and then a long training stint before the Volta a Catalunya which he sees as a key early-season test to his climbing form.

Then later in the year, he teams up with Florian Lipowitz to take on UAE and Visma. “Florian and I are both very ambitious, but we are two different riders. I’m more explosive, Florian needs to warm up like a diesel. We are opposites and together that can only work out well. We need to complement each other and not work against each other for the objective of this team: to win the Tour one day.”

But to do this he has to be better than Tadej Pogacar at some point, who in recent years has continued to improve. The Slovenian has praised Evenepoel for his move to the German team and believes the Belgian should improve. But Evenepoel doesn't take that statement at face value.

“I picked up on it, yes. But is he serious? He might also be saying it to mess with me," he argues. "I want to be better than him. That’s very difficult, we all know that. But that’s the reason I came here. To take those steps. To go over it, on it and over it.”

“That will take a lot of strength, but I’m very motivated and I really needed this new step to open up a kind of ceiling. I hope I can really break through this year.” If there is any rider who is able to take that step however it should be Evenepoel, a few years younger than Pogacar and Vingegaard, and with a talent that matches the other two in most terrains except the high mountains.