Remco Evenepoel lost two consecutive times on Saturday's Critérium du Dauphiné alpine stage, but that the Belgian all-rounder keeps a wider perspective on the latest setback

On a much tougher day of climbing, Evenepoel's time loss of 1:46 was 42 seconds from the previous stage. We made the gap more than 2 times and repeated the winner Primoš Rogliš (Bora-Hansgrohe). 

However, once dropped seven kilograms from the line and again limited the time gap as much as possible, his gutsy insistence on digging deeper slid rather than plunging from the podium to the overall second to sixth, which meant he did not completely collapse.

As the Belgian then pointed out, his overall goal at the Criterium du Dauphine was to win the mid-week time trial and hold it in the mountains for as long as possible. The climbing work that still needs to be done for the Tour de France has always been part of the plan.

Well wrapped up in the unseasonably cold that appeared at the Summit finish of the Summons 1600, Evenepoel said, "Such a finish must be 100% to run." It was a climb with a slope of 10%, such a climb does not lie."As I said at the beginning of the week, if I'm dropped, I'll keep pushing to improve my form, and that's what I did.

13 At the finish line, the Belgian said it was "a tough day, a vertical climb of 4,000 meters, I didn't do much badly in terms of the tour [De France.

"Sure, the results are not there, but everyone knows that I'm coming here to win the TT and then trying to hang on to the climb. That's what happened today.

"Nothing strange happened because it was good to suffer like this and good to my shape, head and fighting spirit.

Even though the emphasis was on using the race to hone the climbing form rather than clinging to a particular GC arrangement, how he told his teammates and Key Mountain domestic Mikel Landa to stay in the front group when he was dropped seven kilometres from the line was not the case. In particular, there was. From that point on, the stage for Belgium turned into a fight with the rest of the field, not himself.

"I was expecting this in the morning, with 25 kilometers to go and the last valley, I told the team I didn't feel good enough, when I fell, I said my Pae it was the best decision," he explained.

If there was a sense of deja vu from the previous day about Evenepoel's performance, his words to the media were a post-stage co to het Laatste Nieuws who was saying about Friday's time loss

"I knew this and was saying this for a week, but obviously it was going through." "I'm not here to win the Dauphine, but rather a break

"Now it's clear that I'm not good enough to follow the best one yet. I'm here to test my limits."

Still, Paul remains at 2:15 overall, not entirely out of the GC fight, and the final stage 8 includes 3,700 meters of vertical climbing and a cat.1 Rise to the plateau des Glieres.  Under such circumstances, there is no doubt that after a miserable day at Tourmale, we recall Evenepoel's spectacular Pyrenees bounce at the Vuelta a España on the 9th of last year and dream of playing in parallel after 9 months.

But the words of Belgium's conclusion to the media on Saturday, when it came to the back-guard action to try to regain his loss on Sunday, indicate that he is currently in a very different baseball game

"Others are too strong to regain time." You don't know what's going to happen, but if I felt I had [bad] legs yesterday, it's even worse today. It was again a celebration of suffering," Evenepoel said.

"[on Sunday] I will hang up as long as possible, and maybe, hopefully, the disease will still end in the top 10. I'll see what tomorrow will bring, but I'm already happy with the win over TT and I'm trying to improve here every day."