Key Takeaways: Tour de Romandie

Breaking down how João Almeida's recent stage racing success, and Remco Evenepoel's struggles, will influence this summer's Tour de France

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Tour de Romandie 2025 Breakdown

João Almeida took a significant step up in the ever-crowded GC hierarchy at Team UAE after sealing a clinical overall win at the six-stage Tour de Romandie across the French-speaking region of Switzerland. Despite not holding the race lead until the conclusion of Sunday’s final stage, Almeida never appeared to waver as he stormed through the final time trial, easily overtaking Bahrain-Victorious’ Lenny Martinez and XDS-Astana’s Lorenzo Fortunato in the overall standings, and nearly challenging Remco Evenepoel for the stage win on the fast course through the streets of Geneva.

2025 Tour de Romandie Top Ten:
1) João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Lenny Martinez (Groupama–FDJ) +26
3) Jay Vine (UAE Team Emirates) +41
4) Lorenzo Fortunato (Astana–XDS) +1’22
5) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal–Quick-Step) +1’26
6) Carlos Rodríguez (INEOS Grenadiers) +1’31
7) Juan Pedro López (Lidl-Trek) +2’05
8) Junior Lecerf (Soudal Quick-Step) +2’16
9) Mathys Rondel (Tudor Pro Cycling) +2’43
10) Javier Romo (Movistar) +2’58

Check out the key highlights and takeaways from the race, as well as what it tells us about the prospect of Almeida serving as a second GC option for UAE at the Tour de France, and what it tells us about Evenepoel’s continued consistency struggles, below:

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Romandie Stage 2-5 Race Notebook:

Stage 2
47.3km-to-go: Remco Evenepoel accelerates over the top of the day’s final climb, presumably in an effort to split the group and attempt to either solo to the finish line or pull a small group clear.

44km: With the terrain going into rolling-to-flat for the rest of the stage, Evenepoel is still on the front. He has been successful in splitting the peloton, but the main GC contenders, like UAE’s João Almeida, are glued to his wheel and (smartly) refusing to work with him. This means he is either stuck setting a hard pace on the front or will have to sit up, which will leave him vulnerable to attacks because he has whittled down the group and depleted team support.

29.6km-14.4km: When Evenepoel takes the pace off at the front, attacks immediately start flying. After a dangerous move with UAE’s Jay Vine is reeled in, EF’s Alex Baudin gets clear, and is joined by a group of dangerous GC outsiders, like Lorenzo Fortunato, and Evenepoel’s Soudal-QuickStep teammate Junior Lecerf. This might theoretically give Evenepoel an advantage since it lets him sit back while the others chase, but it doesn’t solve the problem that Lecerf, while strong, isn’t as good a climber as others in the move, like Fortunato.

Finish: Fortunato wins the stage out of the lead group, while Evenepoel leads the GC group, coming in 56 seconds later. Baudin takes the leader’s jersey due to a strong opening prologue.

Stage 3
1km: Inside the final kilometer of the uphill finish, UAE’s Jay Vine attacks. Despite being in view of the entire group, nobody responds.

Finish: Vine impressively holds off the chasing group, which is led in by Lenny Martinez, with Almeida coming in third and picking up a small time bonus.

Stage 4
7.8km-to-go: Halfway up the decisive climb of the race, the ascent to Thyon 2000 ski resort, João Almeida is setting a hard pace on the front, with Remco Evenepoel, who had been drifting back on the climb since the start, is dropped, and stays with his also-dropped teammates Lecerf.

5.9km: After Almeida thins down the front group, UAE signals its intent to get extremely aggressive in an attempt to drop Martinez by having both riders take turns increasing the pace and forcing Martinez to chase, instead of having Almeida ride a steady pace to the line for Vine, who is ahead of Almeida by 8 seconds in the GC.

3.9km: One of Almeida’s surges eventually drops Vine, but with Fortunato, who leads both Vine and Almeida on the GC heading into the stage, also distanced, Almeida makes the decision to push on, even if it means isolating himself with Martinez, who only trails him by a second in the GC. Behind, Vine refuses to work and marks Fortunato as the group dangles 15-30 seconds behind.

200m: Almeida, wanting to maximize the gap to Fortunato (and potentially Vine), keeps the pace high as they come into the final kilometer. Martinez smartly opens up his sprint from incredibly far out, knowing that the rider to enter the tight final corner with 100m-to-go will win the sprint.

Finish: Martinez successfully enters and exits the turn in the lead, which means he is able to hold off a late-surging Almeida for the stage win, time bonus, and overall race lead. Vine comes in 31 seconds later after being slightly distanced by Fortunato in the sprint for third.

Stage 5
Remco Evenepoel Finish: The World TT Champion appears back to full strength the following day when he roasts the time trial course in Geneva, coming through 18 seconds ahead of Alberto Bettiol to likely seal the stage win.

João Almeida Finish: UAE’s leader puts in a strong ride to finish 11 seconds behind Evenepoel, and 30 seconds ahead of Martinez, to seal the overall race win.

Key Takeaways:

1) João Almeida Is Quietly Asserting Himself as a Legitimate Insurance Policy for Team UAE at the 2025 Tour de France: While I’ve been critical of Almeida in the recent past for his inability to convert incredible talent and form into GC wins, he has undergone a quiet transformation recently, winning two WorldTour stage races, Itzulia Basque Country and Tour de Romandie, in just the past month.

• The combination of dominance he showed to win two stages and the overall at Itzulia, and understated patience to pull out a win at Romandie when he clearly wasn’t at his best, suggests that the 26-year-old Portuguese rider, after five seasons where he has never finished outside the top ten at a Grand Tour but was never able to convert that into a major win, has finally turned a corner.

  • It may seem difficult to imagine that Tadej Pogačar could need any significant support at this summer’s Tour de France, but the looming potential of a crash and subsequent injury to Pogačar, or even just a stronger-than-expected Jonas Vingegaard and Visma-Lease a Bike support squad, means that it is in UAE’s interest to ensure that Almeida comes to the Tour prepared and feels confident in his ability to lead a stage.

    • Wanting to keep Almeida in reserve as a key support rider and potential backup leader is likely the reason for his UAE team not prioritizing having him go all-in to support Jay Vine on Stage 4, and for having him skip the upcoming Giro d’Italia, where he could challenge for the win, to go all-in on Tour preparation.

2) Remco Evenepoel’s Romandie Ride Leaves More Questions Than Answers: The 25-year-old Belgian might have come into the race hoping for a confidence-building stage race tune-up before he begins his push toward the Tour de France, but instead, he leaves Romandie with more questions than answers.

• Outside of resurfacing old questions about his ability to stay with the best on 40+ minute high-altitude climbs, Evenepoel’s struggles on the Thyon 2000 summit finish—dropping well off the GC contenders just two days after attempting to blow the race up extremely far from the finish line on a non-critical GC day before bouncing back to perform at a high level the following day—highlight a recurring issue: a level of performance consistency that falls far below his main GC competition.

  • Being able to ride through sub-par days without a significant step-down in performance is key to being a top-level stage racer, and Evenepoel’s up-and-down performances have undoubtedly kept him from achieving the same level as his GC peers.

    • For example, if we look at the finishing positions of the sport’s top four GC contenders in their last five WorldTour stage races, Evenepoel’s inability to fight through bad days to avoid losing large chunks of time clearly sticks out:

      • Overall Results in Last Five WorldTour Stage Races:

        Tadej Pogačar: 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 2nd

        Jonas Vingegaard: 1st, 2nd, 1st, 2nd, 1st

        Primož Roglič: 1st, 1st, 1st, 10th, 3rd

        Remco Evenepoel: 5th, 3rd, 7th, 2nd, 12th

    • This might seem like an overly harsh judgment, but in an era where wannabe GC winners need to beat a class of rider that never seems to suffer a significant dip in performance, even when building up toward top form, if Evenepoel’s extreme fluctuations continue, it will make it difficult to compete in the top stage races.

3) Lenny Martinez Is Quietly Building an Impressive GC Resume: In just the recent past, the sight of a 21-year-old French rider finishing second in a WorldTour stage race after winning the Queen stage and putting up a strong final time trial would have kicked off a surge of excitement about their prospect to be a major future Tour de France. However, with teams and the media increasingly enamored by younger and younger stars, riders like Martinez, who has won two stages so far in 2025 at major stage races (Paris-Nice Stage 5 and Romandie Stage 4), and finished in the top five overall on two occasions (Volta a Catalunya and Tour de Romandie), Martinez’s consistent rise has been slightly under-the-radar.

• One of the most impressive things about Martinez’s pair of stage wins in 2025 is that instead of being taken after getting into opportunistic breakaways, they have come from the top GC group at the end of hard stages, meaning he isn’t just hanging with stage racing heavyweights on the hardest stages, but actively riding away from them to cap off these stage wins.

• Considering we rarely see riders that aren’t ultra-elite time trialists win modern Grand Tours, his extremely lightweight (52 kilograms) puts certain limits on his ability to generate the necessary raw power to compete against the top riders in time trials.

  • However, even with this handicap, he has put in some surprisingly good performances against the clock, with his ability to finish just two seconds behind time trial specialist Stefan Küng, and ahead of three times Australian TT champion Luke Plapp, on Sunday’s relatively flat course suggests he has the potential to be potent enough in time trials to win a Grand Tour in the near future.