'Remco Evenepoel is too good': Tadej Pogačar puts hard-to-swallow fourth place the World Championships TT behind him

It was a sight that few people thought they'd ever see – four-time Tour de France champion Tadej Pogačar, a rider whom it is easy to think of as invincible – being caught and passed for two-and-a-half minutes in a time trial by Remco Evenepoel.

The unlikely catch happened in yesterday's elite men's time trial in Kigali, Rwanda at the UCI Road World Championships, as the pair tackled the cobbled climb of the Côte de Kimihurura with around a kilometre left of the 40.6km event.

Evenepoel's up-and-down trajectory over the past two seasons, during which he has won Olympic and World titles but suffered major crashes and failed at some of his biggest objectives, made his routing of the Slovenian feel all the more unlikely. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and on this occasion it was Pogačar's turn to show that bad luck can happen to anyone.

Asked how he felt when Evenepoel passed him, Pogačar was ready, as ever, with a quip: "For sure it was a hard one to swallow, but he's Remco, he's too good in this discipline. I hope he prepared 100% for today and he will be 99% ready for next Sunday," he said.

And when one journalist wished him a happy birthday but pointed out it maybe wasn't the present he had hoped for, Pogačar joked: "I don't want to spoil myself on my birthday to win today… so let's try and win on Sunday."

Evenepoel, for his part, played down the incident: “This wasn't my goal for the race, I just wanted to win, and catching him or not didn't really matter. So I think it's not something that we need to make bigger than it is. Because I've also been passed in a TT this year, so it's something that happens or doesn't happen.

"Once you have a rider in sight, you just want to go as fast as possible towards him, because it gives some extra motivation to go through the pain wall, but it was not something that was in my head."

Pogačar, who is the reigning world road race champion, had arrived under-prepared for the time trial, he said, after falling sick in the run-up to the recent Canadian double-header, the GP Montréal and GP Quebec, and missing key sessions on the time trial bike.

"I can be happy with how I suffered today," he said after his unaccustomed fourth place. "It was not my best performance but good in the circumstances. Before Canada I couldn't finish my block of training on the TT bike. I'm looking forward more for the Sunday road race anyway," he insisted.

"After I got sick before Canada… it wasn't that I gave up on the TT but I had to skip a few important training sessions on the TT bike," he said. "But I knew that if I wanted to be 100% for the road race I had to go to Canada.

He added: "I think Canada (where he was 29th at Québec and second at Montréal) was a good decision for the road race."

Pogačar's main focus is clearly Sunday's elite men's road race, in which he will attempt to defend his title over a 267km course featuring a brutal 5,475m of climbing. The race will see him go up against Evenepoel again, Great Britain's Tom Pidcock, Thymen Arensman of the Netherlands and Juan Ayuso of Spain among others.

"I've been enjoying the last few days here training and I'm really looking forward to the road race," he said. "Now I need to just do two more hard training sessions and I'm ready for Sunday."