Key Takeaways: Clásica San Sebastián
Breaking down what yet another win at San Sebastián tells us about Remco Evenepoel's current form, as well as his near future prospects
Remco Evenepoel won his third edition of the one-day Clásica San Sebastián (or Donostia Klasikoa in the local Basque language) in San Sebastiá, deep in the mountainous and picturesque Spanish Basque Country, ahead of local rider Pello Bilbao out of a thrilling two-up sprint. Roughly half a minute behind, La Vuelta a España GC hopeful Aleksandr Vlasov rolled over the line in third, while the peloton limped home nearly three minutes later.
The final podium was part of an elite lead group that formed when Evenepoel launched a long-anticipated attack over the top of the Erlaitz climb with over 70 kilometers remaining. Bilbao and Vlasov were able to hang on when Evenepoel’s attack on the next climb dropped the rest of the front group, but only Bilbao made it over the final climb, the Muriel-Tontorra, and into the seaside finish with Evenepoel. While it appeared for a moment like the punchy Bilbao might have a chance at upsetting the heavy pre-race favorite and reigning World Champion, Evenepoel was able to outfox the veteran and flash his newfound sprinting abilities in the final few hundred meters en route to his third win, in just three starts, at Spain’s biggest one-day race.
San Sebastián 2023 Top Ten:
1) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
2) Pello Bilbao (Bahrain) +0
3) Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora) +28
4) Neilson Powless (EF) +2’50
5) Ion Izagirre (Cofidis) +2’57
6) Toms Skujiņš (Lidl-Trek) +3’02
7) Alex Aranburu (Movistar) +3’02
8) Rui Costa (Intermarché) +3’02
9) Andrea Bagioli (Soudal-QuickStep) +3’02
10) Tiesj Benoot (Jumbo) +3’02
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San Sebastián Notebook:
72.8km: With a small breakaway up the road, Remco Evenepoel attacks at the top of a climb and immediately gets a gap on the field.
67.9km: Since Evenepoel attacked at the top, not on lower done on, the climb, a group, including Aleksandr Vlasov, Pello Bilbao, and Alberto Bettiol, is able to join Evenepoel as he catches the break up front.
50.4km: This ends up being a smart move from Evenepoel since the presence of riders in the front group from most of the biggest teams in the peloton (DSM, Jumbo, EF, Bora) means there is no serious chase from behind. Team with riders up the road mass at the front of the peloton to increase the gap, which currently stands at 53 seconds. With EF rider Alberto Bettiol in the move, Neilson Powless, one of the only riders strong enough to potentially stick with Evenepoel on the remaining climbs, is stuck back in this move and has been taken out of the equation.
48.2km: Up front, Evenepoel is getting plenty of work from his breakaway companions as they drive out the gap to 1’10, heading into the next climb.
39.6km: Once on the climb, Evenepoel attacks the group and, by the top, has dropped everyone except Bilbao and Vlasov, both of whom continue to work with Evenepoel despite knowing that he is the strongest rider in the group and will attempt to drop them on the following climb.
8.6km: On the final climb, Evenepoel continues to tap out a high pace, but his usual ‘destroyer’ pace seems to be missing. Even so, Bilbao and Vlasov are clearly on the limit. Knowing this, Bilbao smartly goes to the front to set a false tempo and trick Evenepoel into giving him a quick respite.
8.4km: A few hundred meters later, Evenepoel gets back to the front and increases the pace, which drops Vlasov. However, Bilbao is able to leverage his position in front of Evenepoel, which gives both a small cushion and the ability to control the pace for a moment to stay with the World Champion.
8.2km: As they reach the top of the climb, Evenepoel lifts the pace in an attempt to drop Bilbao. He looks back, sees that Bilbao is still there, and continues on.
8.1km: At the top of the climb, Evenepoel continues to look back, likely both surprised he wasn’t able to drop Bilbao and concerned about a potential downhill attack from the local Basque rider.
4.2km-1.7km: Despite Evenepoel’s concerns, Bilbao mainly stays behind him on the high-speed, fairly straightforward descent into San Sebastián and appears willing to sit in the World Champion’s wheel until he opens his sprint finish.
600m-300m: But, oddly, Bilbao takes the front inside the final km, which gives Evenepoel prime position for the eventual sprint.
175m: Bilbao, constantly checking for Evenepoel’s wind-up, marks him when he opens his sprint, but he can’t quite get up to speed at the same rate as Evenepoel.
Finish: Evenepoel’s initial jump allows him to get by Bilbao and hold him off for the win. Vlasov comes in roughly half a minute back and Neilson Powless leads the peloton over the line nearly three minutes later.
Five Key Takeaways
1) Remco Evenepoel continues to develop as a racer by picking up critical physical and tactical skills
The ride from Evenepoel to take his third career San Sebastián win in his first three attempts was highly impressive and bodes well for his title defense at next weekend’s World Championships.
Additionally, the manner in which he won the, from a reduced sprint, sees Evenepoel continue to expand his repertoire of skills and greatly increases his chances of winning major races.
Despite rarely winning out of a group throughout the first four years of his career, Evenepoel has four wins from a group of one or more riders so far in 2024. This is key to his career development since being able to go to the line with a handful of riders and still get the win means you can far more often than being forced to win solo.
It isn’t clear if it was entirely intentional, but Evenepoel’s decision to attack toward the top of the climb instead of the bottom, which allowed a larger selection of riders to follow him, was key to the win.
This larger group meant there was no possibility of a focused chase in the group behind since nearly all the major teams had someone up the road and weren’t able to chase, and Neilson Powless, the winner of this race in 2021 and one of Evenepoel’s biggest threats for victory, was stuck in the group behind.
This nuanced decision is not something Evenepoel would have done even just 12 months ago and shows that the 23-year-old is continuing to develop as a racer.
2) Evenepoel’s inability to drop the rest to win solo is likely due to his packed August schedule and could signal he and his QuickStep team were too ambitious with his late-season race planning
The fact that Evenepoel could only get rid of Vlasov in the final few hundred meters of the race’s final climb, and couldn’t get rid of Bilbao at all, stands in stark contrast to the dominant performance we saw in last year’s edition of San Sebastián, as well as the 2022 World Championship road race and Liège–Bastogne–Liège earlier this year.
At these past races, Evenepoel has attacked with such ferocity that even though everyone knew when and where it was coming, there was nothing anybody could do to hold the young rider’s wheel.
Part of the reason for this slightly lower level of power from Evenepoel could be the extra week between San Sebastián and the Vuelta in 2024, and that Evenepoel wishes to be in top form for next weekend’s World Championships.
This packed schedule, even if managed with a reasonable fitness plan, raises its own set of issues.
For example, none of the other major Vuelta contenders, like Primož Roglič, Jonas Vingegaard, Enric Mas, and Geraint Thomas, are attempting to balance peaking for the World Championship Road Race and La Vuelta, which ends over a month after the Worlds road race.
By trying to win San Sebastián, Worlds RR, and La Vuelta a España, Evenepoel will be attempting to go up against the sport’s best three-week racers while balancing a far more packed August schedule. This decision could come back to haunt Evenepoel in the third week of the Vuelta.
3) Pello Bilbao & Aleksandr Vlasov’s odd decision to pull with Evenepoel makes sense when we look at their career history in one-day races
As a rule of thumb, riders should never pull through if they find themselves up the road with Remco Evenepoel (see: Primož Roglič).
As a young rider who likes to win, and almost has to win solo, Evenepoel has no option but to pull you along before attempting to drop you (See: 2021 European Road Race Championships). And, if you do offer to pull yourself, you are only making it easier when Evenepoel inevitably decides to drop you.
With this in mind, it might have seemed odd that Vlasov and Bilbao decided to ride with Evenepoel, even though it almost guaranteed they would be attacked, and dropped, by him later in the race.
However, when we consider that Bilbao and Vlasov might have been riding to secure podium spots, not just attempting to win, it makes a lot more sense.
Before this race, Bilbao had never podiumed at a WorldTour one-day race, and Vlasov had only finished in the top ten in a WorldTour one-day race on two other occasions (both 3rd places).
This means they were both likely happy to pull to distance the peloton and roll the dice that they could hold onto Evenepoel’s wheel when he attacked on the final climb. And for Bilbao, this nearly paid off, as he was only just a few positioning decisions away from potentially beating Evenepoel in a sprint finish.
4) The rest of the top five may have missed out on the win, but they both take massive positives from their rides
Despite being relegated to the lower steps of the podium, the rest of the top five, Bilbao, Vlasov, Neilson Powless, and Ion Izagirre, will feel great about their form going into next weekend’s World Championships.
In particular, Vlasov and Bilbao will carry positive momentum out of this race:
Bilbao, fresh off his first career Tour de France stage win, gets his best result in a WorldTour one-day race at 33-years-old.
Vlasov, after being out of racing for months after abandoning May’s Giro d’Italia with COVID-19, is back and looking great as he prepares to head to the Vuelta to lead his Bora team in the GC.
Being this good after being out of racing for so long is a great sign for Vlasov’s pre-Vuelta fitness.
5) Evenepoel has single-handedly changed the nature of this race
Before Remco Evenepoel won San Sebastián in 2019, nearly every winner of the race in the modern era completed the Tour de France the week prior to winning the biggest Spanish one-day race.
But, since Evenepoel has won three out of the last four editions of the race without racing the Tour prior to these wins, he has single-handedly changed the texture of this race.
Instead of being a race where riders leverage the fitness they gained at the Tour and riders slip off the front of the main group late in the race and head into a thrilling finish where they attempt to hold off the chase, Evenepoel has transformed the race into his personal training ground where he tests the fitness he has gained at a pre-Vuelta training camp and nukes the field as far from the finish line as possible.
In 2019 when Evenepoel got his first San Sebastián win, the time lag between the 1st and 10th rider was 38 seconds, which was the third-largest 1-10 spread since 2006.
Since then, the editions with Evenepoel present haven’t seen a time gap between 1st and 10th smaller than three minutes, which was a spread not seen since the 1980s before Evenepoel’s reign.
This drastic alteration of this race highlights just how much Evenepoel has personally changed the race.
Even when Evenepoel moves on to a different race schedule and starts to target bigger races, like the Tour de France, I would still expect new up-and-coming riders to follow this template and utilize Evenepoel’s ‘train specifically for San Sebastián, go in fresh, aim for the long bomb attack and force the disjointed and tired peloton to chase’ strategy.
For better or worse, this tactic will likely define this race for the foreseeable future unless the course, or its place on the calendar, is significantly altered.
Big-picture breakdown of the 2023 TDF Femmes coming later this week…