Patrick Lefebvre, longtime Quick-Step Alfa Vinyl team manager, said it is too early to decide whether Mark Cavendish will compete in the 2022 Tour de France.

"In my opinion, it is one of the best moves I have ever made," Lefebvre told a small group of reporters at the team's media day in Calpe this week.

"You know the story of Mark and I. He left the team (at the end of 2015) because of budget concerns, and after the disastrous last months in Bahrain (2020, when Cavendish's career seemed to end soberly), he broke my heart."

Cavendish returned to Quick Step in 2021 and had a renaissance in the Tour de France. Lefebvre said, "Everyone said you were lucky. I took the risk, the team accepted him right away, he worked hard. And then I saw the result."

Lefebvre added, however, that a decision on Cavendish's return to the 2022 Tour de France must now wait. Lefebvre apparently attributed this to the fact that Cavendish's participation in the 2021 Tour de France was not made clear before the event.

"That is a very interesting question. Everyone asks me that question.

"But on the other hand, he wasn't even on the Tour de Belgium team, let alone the Tour de France. Then, along with Sam Bennett's history, he took his place, took his chances, and won. But it is too early and too easy to predict what will happen today."

Lefebvre showed that dispassionate statistics do not play a part in the decision-making process. When re-signing Cavendish, Lefebvre let his feelings about Sprinter's predicament take precedence. He says: "I don't work by the numbers; I work by the numbers.

But what is certain about the 2022 Quick-Step Alphavinil star and the Grand Tour is that Remco Evenepoel will make his debut at the Vuelta a España next September. After Evenepoel's big splash in last year's Giro d'Italia, Lefebvre recognizes that three weeks of stage racing will give him more clues this season about the potential of this young Belgian star.

"He is very good, he can win one-day races or one-week races. Some people say (Taddei) Pogachar has already won two Tours at the same age, but Pogachar is Pogachar and Lemko is Lemko."

On why Evenpoel chose the Spanish Grand Tour over the Giro and Tour, Lefebvre said: "It's his choice. I will spend a normal season with him: Tirreno, Walloon Classics, rest after Romandie, Dauphiné or Switzerland, high altitude training during the Tour, and the Vuelta."

"See what happens, then ask me questions. This is a good thing, but we don't have a crystal ball and we can't see the future. I am not Madame Soleil."

Lefebvre may not be a fortune teller, nor does he base his strategy purely on performance data. But there is no disputing that his team will have 65 wins in 2021 (25 of them at the World Tour level) and that Quick Step was the most successful team last season. They also won the World Tour team competition for the third year in a row.

Whether Quickstep Alphavinil can achieve the same high level of success in 2021 remains to be seen. But even if Evenpoel's stage racing career in 2022 and Cavendish's participation (or non-participation) in the Tour will likely dominate the Quick-Step Alphavinille story in the summer, the Flemish team's trademark focus on spring classics races will not wane.

Caspar Asgreen's victories in the Tour of Flanders and E3 Harelbeke, and Julien Alaphilippe's win in the Flèche Wallonne are just three of the team's highlights in the first half of the season.

"We are not weak by any means, and we may be stronger in the Wallon Classics because Julien won't run Flanders. He tried Flanders twice and fell while making the race.

"It's true he didn't win 10 races in 2021, but five years ago there was no Pogachar, Van der Pol, or Wout Van Art. The competition is much stronger. Everyone knew he would attack and get away on the first stage of the Tour or the World Championships. But he did the same thing."

With such a high winning percentage, it is hard to find a downside to Quick-Step's last season, but one of the few downsides was Evenpoel's abandonment of the Giro d'Italia. Lefebvre's answer to that is simple. It's very easy to keep one's wits about one after the event or while watching the race from the sidelines, and from the team's point of view, it's much wiser to look to the future.

"In front of the TV on Monday, I'm winning every race I watch. If I'm in the stands at the soccer, I'm the best player in the world. It's too easy," commented Lefebvre.

"It's like when you're in a car and you're going too fast and you see a wall and you hit the brakes and you can't stop. That's what happened to us. He had a very bad day on the Strade Bianche stage.

"But the best descenders in the world like Vincenzo Nibali were already on the ground and Lemko was hit from behind by that Spaniard at 60 km/h.

"He had a normal winter, he had a normal winter. He had a normal winter and had to change his program to another race from Argentina, so let's hope the race is not cancelled."

Lefebvre himself has experienced some changes since last spring. He is famously outspoken and does his best when faced with opposition, but last fall, Lefevere also decided it was time to step down from the virtual boxing ring that is social media.

According to Lefebvre, he had been trying to use Twitter and Facebook as a more direct means of communicating with the public because of the declining readership of the written press in Belgium. However, the risk of being misunderstood, having one's words not translated or taken out of context proved to be greater than expected.

"They [the attacks he faced on social media] are not pleasant, but it is clear that the Flemish language is not English, so maybe sometimes you have to shut up.

"But it doesn't irk me when people can't be bothered to translate what I really say. They see people with zero or even 10 or 20 followers (on Twitter) and attack me as if I am a criminal.

[23] "So at one point [last fall], I said to myself, 'You idiot, you're 66 years old, you're not ashamed of Twitter, you don't need Twitter.' So I stopped. And I didn't miss a second of it."

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