The Wolfpack takes on the Passo della Crocetta. #ILombardia Photo: @GettySport
Patrick Lefevere satisfied with Soudal - Quick-Step's season: "Our season has been more than successful"
CyclingSaturday, 07 October 2023 at 15:10
Much is said of Soudal - Quick-Step in the past few weeks, but now recent days point towards a bigger chance of the team continuing in 2024. Patrick Lefevere looks back on what was a roller-coaster year, with good feedback however.
“Over the past week I have noticed that no one within Soudal Quick-Step is showing off. What Ilan van Wilder achieved in the Tre Valli Varesine was nothing short of impressive. Few drivers can pull away from riders with that reputation," Lefevere said in his Het Nieuwsblad column. "The top five actually speaks for itself. Five: Tadej Pogacar. Four: Primoz Roglic. Three: Aleksandr Vlasov. Two: Richard Carapaz. One: Ilan van Wilder. That says everything about how highly we should rate that performance.”
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Van Wilder is racing Il Lombardia today where he is a candidate for a top spot alongside Remco Evenepoel, who has had his Grand Tour stints both wrecked - for different reasons - and is now focusing on 2024 and his Tour de France debut. Whether that will be with the Belgian team or not remains to be seen in the coming weeks, as it is unsure what will be of Quick-Step.
Lefevere reflects on a few certain departures, such as that of Andrea Bagioli. “I enjoyed his victory in the Gran Piemonte. Andrea leaves our team for Lidl-Trek and that is a phenomenon that I have noticed before: riders who leave are often freed from all the pressure they put on themselves," he says. "Andrea has won three races in the last three months. He is undoubtedly a good rider and at the age of twenty-four he is still a great talent, but I can say that he joined our team with quite a few credentials. Especially with a high salary that he has not always justified," the team manager shoots however.
Despite the complicated spring classics and lack of a GC result at the Grand Tours with Evenepoel, Lefevere ends up satisfied with the outlook on the yet-to-finish 2023: “I would like to conclude with a few statistics: fifty-eight victories, including a world title and a monument."
"Stage victories in the three Grand Tours. We are in third place in the WorldTour rankings after UAE Emirates and Jumbo-Visma, with a budget that will not allow you to reach a podium in the World Tour. Our season has been more than successful and Lombardy still has to start.”
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024