OPINION | Remco Evenepoel should be encouraged by his hat trick of second place finishes by Tadej Pogacar

Three straight Sundays, three straight silvers behind the same man. On paper, finishing second to Tadej Pogacar at the World Championships road race in Kigali, the European Championships in France, and Il Lombardia in Bergamo looks like a hammer blow. In reality, I think it’s the opposite: a reassuring proof for Remco Evenepoel’s ceiling as he heads to Red Bull – BORA – hansgrohe. He lost to the best version of the best rider of 2025 (and potentially of all time), and he beat, often comfortably, everyone else. That’s not a crisis, that’s a platform.

First, the context that matters most: the week before those silvers, Evenepoel obliterated the World Championship time trial to take a third consecutive rainbow in the discipline. The course in Kigali wasn’t a drag strip, it was lumpy and technical, and he still won by well over a minute. And, along the way to victory, he caught and dropped Pogacar, handing a rare humiliating moment to the Slovenian.

That performance confirmed that his top-end is intact and, against the clock, unmatched. The fact it directly preceded the three runner-up rides is crucial: the form was there, he just met someone in once-a-generation road-race condition.

Now look at the silver streak itself. In Kigali, he was the clear best of the rest as Pogacar repeated the road title, one week later at the Europeans he again dropped a strong field while unable to close the last gap to the Slovenian’s long-range move, and at Lombardia he finished 1:48 behind a solo-winning Pogacar and 1:26 ahead of the next man, Michael Storer. That recurring pattern, second to Pogacar, clear of everyone else, says his baseline is already a long way ahead of the deepest fields on the calendar. It narrows the 2026 job to one problem: closing one gap, not many.

It’s also worth remembering how uneven his 2025 foundations were. He missed a proper winter after that December 2024 training collision with a vehicle, fractures to rib, scapula and hand, and the knock-on effects rippled into the spring. He even left the Tour de France on Stage 14 after an attritional fortnight, where he clearly was not in his best shape in the mountains.

If this is the version of Evenepoel that emerges from a compromised build and a mid-summer reset, then the version with a clean run is the one that should scare everyone. There’s no denying he has a lot on his hands to take the next step to Pogacar, and Vingegaard too. But, if anyone can, Evenepoel can.

What impressed me in all three losses was not what he couldn’t do to Pogacar, it’s what he did do to everyone else. Kigali’s podium (Evenepoel silver, Healy bronze) flattered no one, the European podium (Evenepoel silver, Paul Seixas bronze) came after hard, repeated selections, and Lombardia’s gap was emphatic. Across different terrains and race architectures, he proved he can already out-endure and out-position almost the entire elite field. That’s the bedrock you want before you switch teams and try to add the last five percent to your game.

Endurance on long climbs: When Pogacar’s winning moves came, they came after hours of cumulative load, Passo di Ganda at Lombardia, the late circuits in Rwanda and Drôme-Ardèche. Remco’s ceiling is plenty high; the marginal gains now live in fatigue resistance on 30–45-minute climbs after 5+ hours. That is training-block solvable (think altitude, volume, low-glycogen sessions timed around race blocks), but it’s also a team-process problem: pacing, positioning, bottle discipline, and not spending pennies early.

Red Bull – BORA – hansgrohe has the roster depth and high-mountain expertise (Roglic, Hindley, Vlasov profiles within that system) to test him in the exact terrain that decides Tours and Lombardias. That’s not to say the gap will be easy to close, but he will certainly be able to make improvements at Red Bull.

Grand Tour durability: 2025 showed bursts, the Tour ITT win level, the Dauphiné and Romandie time trials, but the three-week arc never stabilized. The assignment for 2026 is boring by design: build a boringly consistent Remco for days 12–20. That means heat and altitude protocols, and a team hierarchy in the mountains that prevents death-by-a-thousand accelerations. He doesn’t need to reinvent himself, he needs to finish the third week with the same engine he starts with, or at least more in the tank. Evenepoel often has one or two days during a grand tour where he doesn’t look himself. That’s what made his 2024 Tour so impressive, he needs that level of consistency again with a few extra percentages in the mountains.

Stage-race habits: He hasn’t won an overall stage race since the 2024 Volta ao Algarve (February 18, 2024). That’s a long gap for a rider of his class, and it’s the simplest morale and process win available in early 2026: pick a one-week race with multiple climbing days, bring the full train, and dominate the race. Starting the BORA era by re-normalizing GC control for seven days will pay off when the race is 21 days. The palmarès doesn’t need it; the psychology and the systems do.

Zero drama: Every conversation about his ceiling is contingent on health. The 2024 vehicle-door crash stole his winter, compressed his spring, and left fingerprints on his Tour in 2025. The biggest “gain” he can make this winter is the absence of bad news. That means conservative traffic management on training, defensive positioning in sketchy race phases, and a calendar that escalates sensibly instead of theatrically. Nothing will help more than a quiet, uneventful January–March that lets the physiology catch up to his ambition.

Why the three silvers are encouraging

At Lombardia, he finished one minute forty-eight behind Pogacar, and more than a minute clear of third place. At the Europeans, he was the only rider who could even animate the chase. In Kigali, he out-kicked a world-class cast for silver after six hours on violent terrain. Those are not “nearly man” performances, they are elite outcomes in fields where one outlier is currently rewriting what “peak” looks like. If the rival you must beat is running arguably the hottest season of the century, your job is to make sure that everyone else is behind you while you close the last gap in increments. He did exactly that, three weeks in a row.

This off-season he changes jerseys. A fresh environment can be catalytic, new altitude camps, new TT protocols (even if he’s already world-class), new mountain guardrails, and a GC structure designed around him. Red Bull – BORA – hansgrohe have already signalled that remit: build a stronger Grand Tour team around Remco to attack Pogacar/Vingegaard.

The talent and budget are there, the three silvers show the engine is still humming. The key is to arrive at spring without a detour through rehab. Evenepoel will have to prove he is the strongest at Red Bull, ahead of the young German superstar Florian Lipowtiz. But, if he is as talented as I believe, he will be able to do that.

If I’m Evenepoel, I’m frustrated, of course I am. But I’m also seeing the shape of the problem clearly for the first time: one rider is ahead, and not by much; everyone else is behind. Add a winter without interruptions, win an early stage race to set the tone, build an altitude-backed endurance layer for long climbs, and keep the bike upright. That’s a short, achievable to-do list for someone who just wore rainbow stripes again in a discipline where perfection is measurable to the second. The silvers are not a ceiling. They’re the on-ramp.