POTENTIAL FULFILLED

After a string of near misses Cadel Evans entered 2011 with something to prove – Chris Marshall-Bell writes there would be no consolation prize for him at the Tour de France this time

- Chris Marshall-Bell

It seems incomprehensible looking at his palmarès now, but back in 2011, Cadel Evans, twice a podium finisher at the Tour de France, world champion two years previously and almost a winner of the Giro d’Italia the year after, was effectively written off.

“I remember reading some criticism from a team manager of a French team who said that I was finished,” Evans recalls to Cycling Weekly. “I was, he claimed, just a one-day rider now and was no more.”

As the adage goes, it was fuel loaded onto the fire; an inferno that was already well ablaze within the BMC Racing ranks and the Evans household. So unlucky in the past in his quest to become Australia’s maiden Tour winner, Evans was determined to right the wrongs of 2010, when he failed in the Giro and the Tour.

And 2011 was his year. “There was little expectation externally,” he explains, “but within the team we were ambitious, doing the work on a well-defined programme, and all it needed was to repeat 2010 but have some luck this time.” Everything came together as he dominated early-season stage races en route to finally winning that elusive yellow jersey.

Rocky road

To understand the scepticism of Evans, we have to rewind to the start of 2010.

The former mountain biker, resplendent in the rainbow jersey and coming off the back of a win at Flèche Wallonne, went into the Giro d’Italia as a hot favourite. He was in pink by the end of stage two, but then a bout of untimely diarrhoea knocked him, dropped him as low as 15th before he roused to finish fifth.