Remco Evenepoel has pushed back at comments made by former TT world champion Tom Dumoulin after the now retired Dutchman picked some holes in the young Belgian's TT technique, saying he sometimes rode "with fear" and gave time away to his biggest rivals.
In an interview with Wielerflits, Dumoulin said Evenepoel (Soudal QuickStep) was the most aero TT rider in the world, which was a big reason why he was currently the best in the discipline most of the time.
However, he also picked some holes in Evenepoel's technique, pointing to the fact his cornering can sometimes be suspect, causing him to lose to time. However, Evenepoel has pointed out he won the TT, at the Tour de France, that Dumoulin picked out to critique and had also won the Olympic TT in wet conditions.
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"He probably didn't see the Olympics, did he?" Evenepoel said when it was put to him that Dumoulin had critiqued his cornering, specifically in the opening TT stage at the Tour this year. "I won that time trial too (in the Tour), I think. Tom can be quite strange sometimes."
Evenepoel was speaking in a joint pre-Worlds interview with Victor Campenaerts in Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad.
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"The Games were in the rain. Slippery. And even there I won (shrugs and looks at Campenaerts, ed). Victor had a good quote about that this week: 'When you win everything, people sometimes start to hate you.' Or something like that… (Campenaerts interjects: “If you're too good, there's always a group of people who don't like that.”) Voilà. So we amuse ourselves with such conversations.”
Dumoulin made his remarks in a pre-Worlds analysis interview, where he was asked to pick out Evenepoel's strengths and weaknesses against the clock as he rides in Zurich tomorrow to try and retain the TT world title he won last year.
Dumoulin, who became TT world champion in 2017 in Bergen, said several times that Evenepoel was the best TT rider in the world "by far" at present. However, he added the Belgian's advantage over some of the other big names was undermined by his bike handling and when the benefits of his aero advantage was minimised on climbs.
“His cornering technique, he is still a bit inconsistent in that. Sometimes I think: 'Wow, he goes through the corner quite neatly'. But he has also ridden time trials with fear," Dumoulin said in his interview with Wielerflits.
"Take the first corners in the first time trial of the Tour de France this year. That did not look good. Compared to Pogačar, he lost an awful lot of time there. But in the other aspects he is so far above that he still wins.”
