The mood was subdued amongst the Red Bull team at their unadorned team hotel, the Campanile Findrol Savoie Leman. Although double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel had secured the team’s second consecutive stage victory in the Tour de France, the crash that forced German cycling star Florian Lipowitz out of the race weighed heavily on the team.
“We won’t just miss him in the battle for the podium; we’ll also miss him as a person here. We won today, but it’s not as though it’s absolutely brilliant for us. I also feel sorry for Remco that things aren’t all plain sailing here,” said team boss Ralph Denk.
Lipowitz’s season is effectively over
Lipowitz was still in hospital at the time. The 25-year-old suffered a broken collarbone in his fateful crash during the individual time trial. Last year’s third-placed rider in the Tour was clearly in shock. His season is effectively over. He is expected to be out of action for at least six weeks. He is unlikely to be fit in time for the Vuelta (22 August to 13 September) or the World Championships in Montreal (20 to 27 September). At best, he might be able to compete in one-day races in Italy this autumn, such as the Tour of Lombardy (10 October).
And so ended a Tour for the German that, in any case, had never quite felt like his own. Constant discussions about the dual leadership, the minor spat with Evenepoel in the first week of the Tour, and on top of that the disappointment on the mountain stage to the Plateau de Solaison, when he had to let race leader Tadej Pogacar and Evenepoel pull away. For Lipowitz, whose career has taken such a meteoric rise over the past two years, there is a lot to process.
The Red Bull team is now putting all its eggs in the Evenepoel basket. The Belgian is second behind Pogacar, 4 minutes and 32 seconds behind. “We’re not going to give the podium away. It’s certainly going to be a tough battle – there are some high mountains coming up. But we’ve also got a strong Remco,” says Denk. Could there perhaps be even more to come? “I’ve always said that if anything happens, you’ve got to be on your guard. But in a head-to-head battle, I don’t see a chance there.”
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