{"id":263376,"date":"2025-07-14T04:59:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T04:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/263376\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T04:59:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T04:59:11","slug":"merlier-and-soudal-are-having-their-cake-and-eating-it-too-at-the-2025-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/263376\/","title":{"rendered":"Merlier and Soudal are having their cake and eating it too at the 2025 Tour"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Merlier<\/p>\n

News & Racing<\/a><\/p>\n

Who says you can’t bring a sprinter and a GC contender to the Tour de France?<\/p>\n

\"Dane<\/p>\n

Cor Vos<\/p>\n

After his first career Tour de France start back in 2021, Tim Merlier spent four long years waiting to get back to the race as his teams kept looking to other ambitions at the Tour each season. Even when he finally got the nod to return to the sport’s biggest race this year, his Soudal-Quick-Step squad made its intentions clear going into the Grand D\u00e9part.<\/p>\n

Merlier would get his chances to contend for the sprints, but the team was built around his Belgian compatriot Remco Evenepoel. While rivals like Jonathan Milan and Jasper Philipsen could rely on well-oiled lead-out machines, poor Merlier would have to rely on only one or two teammates in the sprints, and then only if they weren’t busy tending to Evenepoel’s every need. Would he be able to achieve anything with so much less support?<\/p>\n

Apparently, yes. Yes, he would.<\/p>\n

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\n News & Racing<\/a>
\n Tim Merlier<\/a>
\n Soudal-QuickStep<\/a>
\n Remco Evenepoel<\/a>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News & Racing Who says you can’t bring a sprinter and a GC contender to the Tour de…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-263376","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\/114849825724425114","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263376","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=263376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}