Key Takeaways: Volta ao Algarve & Tour des Alpes-Maritimes
Breaking down the key takeaways from a busy weekend of racing as the 2024 season hurtles towards major GC showdowns and a Spring Classics kickoff in a few short days
Even with the effective cancellation of the Vuelta a Andalucia (Ruta del Sol), the past weekend of racing, particularly the final stage of the Volta ao Algarve, produced a few notable and thrilling moments. After Remco Evenepoel appeared to seal overall victory on Stage 4 with a scorching time trial performance, Wout van Aert and Ben Healy attempted to flip the script the following day on the final stage via a long-range attack. While the move was eventually brought to heel with the help of the Bora-Hansgrohe team, it delivered a thrilling final hour of racing that hopefully teased showdowns to come when Spring Classics season kicks off this coming Saturday at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad.
*Premium subscribers will receive a breakdown of the UAE Tour, which kicked off today, and O Gran Camiño, which starts on Thursday, throughout the week.
I’ve attempted to pull out the key highlights and condense key takeaways from the busy weekend below:
Volta ao Algarve Stages 4 & 5
Catch Up:
Algarve Stages 2 & 3
Stage 4 TT: Remco Evenepeol rolls out of the start gate and is absolutely flying the moment he gets into his ultra-aerodynamic position on a flat, straight section with his oversized 1x 62-tooth front chainring.
When Evenepoel hits one of the course’s short, but steep, climbs, we can see that his 12-speed 11x34 tooth sprocket is giving him enough range to spin up and over the climb even with the big front chainring.
Finish: Evenepoel comes over the line with a scorching time, and due to being 51 seconds up on Dani Martínez, and a minute up on Wout van Aert, he all but seals the overall victory. Interestingly, the only rider close to him is 21-year-old American Magnus Sheffield.
Stage Top Three:
1) Remco Evenepoel (Visma) +0
2) Magnus Sheffield (Ineos) +16
3) Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ) +29
Stage 5
39km-to-go: Wout van Aert takes advantage of town and steep hill creating a course pinch point and attacks off the front. He is joined by Ben Healy and his teammate Per Strand Hagenes, the trio quickly bridges up to the breakaway.
16km-3km: Healy and Van Aert ride clear of the breakaway with Gijs Leemreize. They pull out a gap of over a minute of the Soudal-QuickStep led peloton, which, in theory, presents an issue for Remco Evenepoel’s GC lead. However, when Dani Martínez’s Bora-Hansgrohe team comes to the front to take over the pacemaking, the trio’s gap starts to plummet and they are eventually caught with roughly 3km remaining on the final climb.
2km: Healy, the last man standing from the breakaway, impressively attacks after being caught by what is left of the peloton. He is immediately marked by Martínez.
1.2km: Evenepoel makes a slight dig, with Martínez again closely marking.
800m: Sepp Kuss attacks, but on such a short climb in a relatively short race, he is fairly easily marked by far more explosive riders in the group behind, like Tom Pidcock, Evenepoel, and Martínez.
350m: With the Visma duo of Jan Tratnik and Kuss (somewhat oddly) sitting on the front, Evenepoel opens up his sprint from an incredibly long way from the finish line.
300m: Evenepoel initially gets a solid gap over Martínez, with Pidcock following closely behind.
200m: However, Martínez, just like Stage 2, quickly reels in, and overtakes, Evenepoel, while Pidcock is still trailing in third.
Finish: Nearly 40 seconds after Evenepoel opened up the sprint, Martínez comes over the finish line for his second stage win of the five-stage race, with Evenepoel easily sealing the overall win in second and Pidcock in third. Impressively, Ben Healy holds on for 8th place despite his breakaway efforts.
Stage 5 Top Three:
1) Dani Martínez (Bora-Hansgrohe) +0
2) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
3) Tom Pidcock (Ineos) +3
Final GC Standings:
1) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
2) Dani Martínez (Bora-Hansgrohe) +43
3) Jan Tratnik (Visma) +1’21
4) Ben Healy (EF) +1’42
5) Thymen Arensman (Ineos) +1’45
6) Tom Pidcock (Ineos) +1’49
7) Wout van Aert (Visma) +1’57
8) Sepp Kuss (Visma) +1’59
9) Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ) +2’06
10) António Morgado (UAE) +2’09
Five Key Takeaways
1) Remco Evenepoel: The 24-year-old Belgian star wins the overall at this early-season race for the third time in five years on the back of a world-beating time trial performance. While this is impressive and bodes well for his coming season, he was handily beaten in two uphill sprints by Dani Martínez along the way.
The biggest concern from these losses is that not only did he not appear to learn his lesson after launching far too early on Stage 2, but he doubled down on the mistake and went from even further out on Stage 5, which gave Martínez the perfect lead-out to launch around him from for the stage win.
This type of failure to learn the finer points of in-race finesse and tactics has been a trend throughout his career. It will be an issue when he faces top-tier competition at the upcoming Tour de France, or even the Ardennes Classics later this Spring.
However, even having said that, his ability to continue to improve his already great time trialing bodes well for his chances in modern Grand Tours, which are won in the race against the clock.
A significant note from the time trial was Evenepoel running a massive 1x 62-tooth chainring (inspired by Lotto-Dtsy’s TT specialist Victor Campenaerts) that I assume he was testing in advance of the 2024 Tour de France.
If I had to guess, I’d say the advantage is the ability to ride with a straight chain line while in a massive gear and pedal on the rolling descents at an incredibly high speed. Whatever it is, the modern time-trialing trend is shrinking crank lengths (which allow you to ride at a higher cadence even in a massive gear while getting into a more aerodynamic position) and growing chainrings.
2) Dani Martínez: As noted after his Stage 2 win, Martínez’s performance this week, particularly his ability to win hotly-contested uphill finishes, speaks to why his acquisition by Bora from Ineos over the off-season was such a homerun.
Even if he never fully pans out as a Grand Tour GC prospect, the fact that he can compete at such a high level, and win, against top-tier riders in shorter stage races is extremely valuable for Bora.
Additionally, his performance over the last week has shown just how valuable of a domestique he could be for Primož Roglič this summer at the Tour de France.
3) Ben Healy & Wout van Aert: The two riders' decision to attack the peloton and attempt to turn the race on its head and press Soudal-QuickStep’s ability to deliver Evenepoel the overall victory not only created exciting racing but was also an indication that their goals lay elsewhere.
For example, with both riders sitting in the top six in the GC heading into a final stage that featured a short, steep climb to the finish line, most riders would have selected the low-risk decision of sitting in the group until the final climb instead of the extremely high-risk, low-chance of success decision to attack the group.
The fact that not only did they choose to attack but continued to stay high up in the GC, and in Healy’s case, hang in the lead group after being caught, tells us that they are both having success in their fitness build towards their respective Spring Classics campaigns (Flemish for Van Aert and Ardennes for Healy). It is also actually possible that their late-race attack was as much about increasing their training load as it was about challenging for the overall win.
After this impressive week, Healy should be considered one of the few true contenders to Evenepoel at Amstel Gold and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
4) Tom Pidcock: The young cross-discipline star has had an unusually quiet Spring across both cyclocross and road where he is building up for an incredibly ambitious Spring and Summer of racing where he will be challenging for wins in one-day Monuments, Tour de France GC position and the Olympic Mountain and Road biking titles.
While he has looked strong and bettered his GC position from 7th to 6th in the GC at Algarve from 2023 to 2024, he has appeared to continue the trend of lacking his usual ‘pop’ and explosiveness, which has been going on since last Spring (his last road win was at Strade-Bianche in March 2023).
It is far too early to jump to any conclusions, but I couldn’t help but feel like the Pidcock who outsprinted Wout van Aert to win De Brabantse Pijl in 2021 won atop Alpe d’Huez at the Tour in 2022, or won on this exact climb in 2023, would have won dusted Evenepoel and Martínez to win Sunday’s final stage (he did beat Martínez by 11-seconds on this finish in 2023).
Perhaps this 11-month dry spell is nothing, but I haven’t been wild about Pidcock’s development during his time at Ineos, which makes this apparent stagnation a slight concern.
5) Tao Geoghegan Hart: Despite not having raced since leaving the 2023 Giro d’Italia after breaking his hip and going through months of postoperative rehabilitation, Lidl-Trek’s big off-season signing looked strong during the race’s two uphill finishes, which were contested at incredibly high speeds.
This is a great sign for both Lidl-Trek and Geoghegan Hart, who will be looking to return to Grand Tour contention in 2024 after finally looking back to his Grand Tour-winning form before he crashed out of last year’s Giro.
Tour des Alpes-Maritimes
Stage 1 Top Three:
1) Ethan Vernon (Israel-Premier Tech) +0
2) Sean Flynn (DSM) +0
3) Vincenzo Albanese (Arkéa-B&B) +0
Stage 2 Top Three:
1) Benoît Cosnefroy (Decathlon AG2R) +0
2) Aurélien Paret-Peintre (Decathlon AG2R) +0
3) Vincenzo Albanese (Arkéa-B&B) +0
Final GC:
1) Benoît Cosnefroy (Decathlon AG2R) +0
2) Vincenzo Albanese (Arkéa-B&B) +2
3) Aurélien Paret-Peintre (Decathlon AG2R) +3
The two-stage race along southern Frances's mountainous Mediterranean coast featured plenty of exciting and aggressive racing and served up two significant takeaways:
Israel-Premier Tech successfully continued its early-season assault on UCI points as it looks towards WorldTour promotion at the end of the 2025 season.
After a month of racing, they are sitting 7th in the UCI standings (not bad for a second-division team) due to a calculated strategy to grab as many ‘easy’ points as possible.
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, which finished 1st and 2nd on the final stage, has entered 2024 looking on a higher level than they’ve been riding at in years.
They are currently sitting 8th in the UCI standings, which, if sustained, would be a major improvement from their 18th-place finish in 2023 and 15th-place finish in 2022.
What to Watch This Week:
UAE Tour Stages 2-7:
Where: Max (USA), Discovery+ (Europe), FloBikes (Canada)
When: Tuesday, Feb 20th-Sunday 25th, 5:30am-7:30am EST (estimate)
Why: Some of the sport’s purest high-speed bunch sprints take place amongst its top sprinters against dramatic backdrops, from endless sand dunes to futuristic cityscapes with two surprisingly difficult summit finishes mixed in
O Gran Camiño Stages 1-4
Where: Max (USA), Discovery+ (Europe), FloBikes (Canada)
When: Thursday, Feb 22th-Sunday 25th, 9:30am-11:30am EST (estimate)
Why: Jonas Vingegaard makes his 2024 season debut in a showdown against Carlos Rodríguez, David Gaudu and Egan Bernal in Galicia