As far as closely guarded digits go, the power data of top professional riders ranks up there with the Fort Knox door code or the King’s phone number. So Cycling Weekly was as surprised as any when Remco Evenepoel revealed his functional threshold power (FTP) on his YouTube channel this week.
Surprised not only because such things are so often kept hush-hush; in addition to that, the figure was very much in the bracket marked ‘jaw-slackening’. How about this: 425 watts.
It’s even higher than Tadej Pogačar‘s reported, but unverified, 415 watts number.
The figures were revealed in a conversation the Olympic champion had with coach Dan Lorang on a windswept Mount Teide in Tenerife. In the middle of a series of efforts and in-between painful looking blood-draws to measure lactate, Lorang tells him: “It’s that fine line: 420, we are under threshold; 425 we are somewhere there…”
Extrapolated using Evenepoel‘s 63kg frame, that works out at a full 6.75 watts per kilo – just a shade under the fabled 6.8kg that, in theory, was guaranteed to the win the Tour de France.
For those unfamiliar with functional threshold power – usually just known as FTP, it’s a key power training metric approximately equivalent to the effort a rider can maintain for an hour, and can be used to set lower and higher zones.
In the video, Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe coach Dan Lorang, who leaves the team after the Tour de France, explains the protocol: “Today we have a threshold day,” he says. “That means several efforts where we do a steady pace. It should be a preparation for longer climbs also in the race. We start here with smaller intervals; further in the camp we do a little bit longer intervals.”
Having already done a long warm-up effort at a trifling 350 watts, Evenepoel’s ready to grit his teeth, and selects some tunes to match. “Now we’re starting with some harder music,” he tells the videographer as he scrolls through his phone, “because it will be painful.”
If various reports are to be believed, the Belgian’s numbers – both outright power and w/kg – are also higher than Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG). The Slovenian’s FTP has been estimated at 415 watts which, for his 66 kilos of weight, add up to 6.29w/kg. These figures were not disproved when Pogačar revealed his wattages, apparently unwittingly, on a Strava training file earlier this year.
Evenepoel’s 22-minute video is an insightful look at a two-day training camp on Tenerife that peeks into not only his power data but his calories too, as well as the day to day of being on training camp at altitude.
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