Remco Evenepoel won the individual time trial on stage five of the Tour de France as Tadej Pogacar took the yellow jersey from Mathieu van der Poel.<\/b><\/p>\n
Belgium’s Evenepoel, who is the world and Olympic champion in the discipline, lived up to his billing as favourite on the 33km route around Caen with a stunning performance.<\/p>\n
The Soudal Quick-Step rider averaged 54km\/h to finish 16 seconds quicker than Slovenia’s Pogacar, with Italy’s Edoardo Affini in third, 33 seconds back. <\/p>\n
“I gained positions at every checkpoint. The pacing was perfect and everything was on point, I’m super happy,” said Evenepoel.<\/p>\n
“I did what I had to do to take as much time as possible and step up in GC [General Classification]. It’s kind of the same situation as last year, so I’m happy with that. It’s a big step towards the podium, but there’s still a long way to go. <\/p>\n
“Everybody knows what’s coming next week and the week after. One year, I will come to win the Tour but it’s a bit too early this year.”<\/p>\n
Pogacar was the big beneficiary of the day after an excellent ride of his own as his main GC rival, Jonas Vingegaard, toiled.<\/p>\n
The Dane, who has won the Tour twice, ended the race against the clock in 13th to ship over a minute to three-time champion Pogacar, with Evenepoel moving up to second in the GC standings 42 seconds behind. <\/p>\n
Vingegaard is fourth overall, with promising French rider Kevin Vauquelin 14 seconds ahead of him.<\/p>\n
Dutch rider Van der Poel came home in 18th and drops to sixth.<\/p>\n
The result also means that Pogacar becomes the first rider to wear the yellow, green and polka-dot jerseys at this stage in the Tour since Belgium’s Eddy Merckx in 1970.<\/p>\n
Thursday’s sixth stage is a lumpy 201.5km ride from Bayeux to Vire Normandie, which contains six categorised climbs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Remco Evenepoel won the individual time trial on stage five of the Tour de France as Tadej Pogacar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-252056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114826016521654448","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}