Remco Evenepoel is set to arrive at the Tour de France 2026 with no racing in his legs for 68 days, a deliberate gamble that will leave him without another start between late April and the opening stage in Barcelona on July 4.
That timeline matters because the Belgian has been idle since finishing third at Liège-Bastogne-Liège in late April, and he is now expected to go all the way to Barcelona without a tune-up race. For a rider expected to challenge the podium, it is an unusually clean break from competition at exactly the moment most contenders normally want race rhythm, not training blocks.
Team performance chief Patxi Vila said the team believes Evenepoel can handle that approach. “We’ve seen that Remco can achieve a very high level without having to take part in preparation races,” Vila said. “We prefer a straight line to the Tour.” He added that the plan should leave him “more relaxed and in better shape” when the race starts in Spain.
The strategy is striking because it asks Evenepoel to do something most contenders do not: skip all preparation races and rely entirely on training. That is a cleaner build than the one usually seen among Tour leaders, but it also runs against the habits of modern winners, none of whom have reached the start line with a racing gap this long. Jonas Vingegaard came close to that kind of layoff after crashing out at Itzulia Basque Country in early April 2024 and was sidelined for nearly 90 days, yet he still finished second to Tadej Pogačar at that year’s Tour.
Belgian cycling has waited 50 years for another yellow jersey, with Lucien Van Impe still the last rider from the country to win the Tour in 1976. Evenepoel will now try to narrow that gap with a training-only run-in that leaves one blunt question hanging over Barcelona: whether freshness will prove more valuable than race hardening when the real climbing starts.
