Patrick Lefevere has said he is already being contacted by agents trying to get contracts for their riders for the 2024 season as the Belgian team manager needs to build a Grand Tour team around Remco Evenepoel. However, Lefevere said there would be no great transformation of his team, from a classics squad to a Grand Tour line-up, until 2024 or the year after.
He was not going to start lining up riders now to support Evenepoel for fear of paying too much. He said not winning the Tour would not undermine his own record as a team boss as he had already achieved so much, which most people could not come close to.
"The day I die, on my grave, it won't be written 'he didn't win the Tour de France'," Lefevere told RTBF in Belgium. "I'm not going to consider my career a failure if we don't win the Tour. I think a lot of people don't come close to me in terms of wins, quality and quantity.
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"Thanks to Remco, we have the world champion for the third year in a row in our team," he added of Evenepoel, who also won the Vuelta this year. "For the first time in our history, we win a Grand Tour. We've been waiting for this for so long. We can't complain about previous years but win a Grand Tour, for a team that has always been labeled as a team of classics, it's really good."
Lefevere also said he was content to listen to Evenepoel's wishes to ride the Giro d'Italia next year rather than go to the Tour de France after his victory in La Vuelta this year. He said it "wouldn't have been very smart" on the part of his Soudal-QuickStep team not to listen to Evenepoel.
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"When you do sport at a high level, you can't push the athlete in a direction he doesn't want. They're professionals. They are paid. On paper, we are the bosses but we sit at the table and we discuss, we weigh the 'pros' and 'cons' and then we decide.
"As Belgians, we naturally wanted to push him to ride the Tour de France. Finishing 4th in the Tour could be something fantastic but people would immediately say 'the Tour is something other than the Vuelta'. We didn't want to miss a step in its evolution. So we said to ourselves that we were going to do the Vuelta first, then the Giro and then the Tour de France. You have to go step by step."
Lefevere added while his team may have to change its line-up to better support Evenepoel's Grand Tour credentials, especially if he wants to win the Tour de France, there would be no "transformation" in the short-term. Some of his riders had contracts with periods left to run, meaning the team would need to wait until "2024 and later" before making any big changes.
"Remco is young, he is a rider who will ride the Tour de France at least six times. We are not with the gun to the head 'if it's not in 2024, it will never be'," he said, adding many riders already wanted to get into his team for the period after 2024, when they perceived the team line-up will change.
"We are in December 2022 and we are discussing 2024 contracts. Everyone reads the press and knows that I want to support Remco on the Grand Tours," he said. "There are people who want to come but we naturally drive up the prices. It is up to me as a manager to find the balance between what someone is worth and what he is asking for, avoiding make mistakes."
