Remco Evenepoel rode the Tour de France with a broken rib. The Belgian reveals this a few days after his painful abandonment in the world’s biggest cycling race.
The 25-year-old Evenepoel tearfully hit the brakes on Saturday after being dropped early on the Col du Tourmalet. He was third in the general classification at that moment, although he had experienced three bad days in a row.
After the abandonment, Evenepoel remained silent for a few days. The Belgian broke the silence on Thursday with a long statement on Instagram. In it, he says that he broke a rib a week before the Tour start during a fall at the Belgian road championship.
“That wasn’t the worst, but certainly not ideal,” says Evenepoel. The Belgian already started with a large conditional deficit due to a collision with a postal car during a training ride in December. He suffered fractures to his rib, right shoulder blade, and right hand. The rehabilitation took months.
“I constantly felt like I was behind the facts. During training, I never really felt myself: my usual feeling wasn’t there. In hindsight, I wasn’t overtrained, but exhausted. My body was still working hard to heal from the fractures and the trauma of the fall.”
‘I broke and am proud of it’
Despite everything, Evenepoel ‘just’ started in the Tour. “I didn’t want to let go of my goal, which I had fought so hard for,” writes the Belgian, who won the individual time trial in and around Caen. “The first week went well, but in the second week, the consequences of all those efforts started to become visible.”
Evenepoel openly tells how he encountered the man with the hammer during the Tour. “I held on, but deep down I knew I wasn’t at my best. Until my body finally said: enough. On day twelve, I cracked. Everything I had carried up to that point caught up with me. But still, I didn’t want to give up. I fought as hard as I could.”
“For my fans, I wanted to give it my all until my last breath. But two days later, I felt completely empty. That was the moment I decided to step off the bike. And on top of that came the first signs of an infection. What started as a vague discomfort turned into a significant sinus infection. That hit hard.”
According to Evenepoel, the abandonment was “one of the rawest and most vulnerable moments” of his career. “I broke and am strangely proud of it. It takes strength to show that things don’t always go the way you want. That even if you want something very much, your body sometimes has other plans.”
“That moment, however difficult it was, showed that I am human. Leaving the Tour was the hardest decision I have had to make in a long time. But it was the right one. For once, I listened to my body.”