Deceuninck-QuickStep team manager Patrick Leferet said that Lemko Evenpoel's race program (open in new tab) for his Grand Tour debut at the 2021 Giro d'Italia has changed significantly, and the 20-year-old Belgian said he expects to show more leadership and win bigger races.

Evenpoel's 2020 goal of winning the individual time trial at the Tokyo Olympics will carry over to next year and will once again be his main objective, Lefevere told Belgian media.

"The Olympics are for national teams, not for World Tour teams like ours," he said. But for Lemko, the Olympics are a priority, and that will never change."

What will change, however, is Evenpoel's program for next summer's scheduled competitions, and as Lefebvre suggests, Lemko Evenpoel is stronger, and arguably older and wiser.

The athlete many call "the new Eddy Merckx" won both the junior road race and individual time trial at the 2018 World Championships, then skipped the under-23s to join WorldTour team Deceuninck-QuickStep for 2019 He won overall titles at the Clasica San Sebastian and Baloise Belgian Tour, and became the elite men's European time trial champion in his debut year at the elite level.

This season, before being interrupted by the coronavirus problem, Evenpoel competed in two races, the Tour of San Juan and the Tour of Algarve, winning a stage and the overall in both. He then rode Tirreno-Adriatico, Volta a Catalunya, Brabant Pays, Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and was scheduled to make his Grand Tour debut at the Giro d'Italia in May.

All of these races have been postponed, but Evenpoel recently did not completely rule out competing in the Vuelta a España later this season.

The most likely scenario is to run the first three-week race at next season's Giro, but Lefebvre is keen to see Evenpoel's buildup to the Corsa Rosa take a different path.

"It will be different," he said. 'Earlier this season we were racing with the brakes on. I didn't expect Lemko to win the Tour of San Juan and the Tour of Algarve this year. Everything is going very fast for him and we will take that into account next year."

"I don't know what he will do next year," Lefebvre admitted, "but he will certainly change his program. He can do what he wanted (so far) in 2020. We are not asking Lemko to win in San Juan or Algarve."

"We told him to show something in Tirreno. And the Giro? I was going to let them run their own race there and if they started to get tired they could go home.

"If he runs the Giro next year, he should be able to finish," Lefebvre said, suggesting that more is expected of Evenpoel next year.

"Whether he will be in contention for the overall remains to be seen. We have yet to see him tackle a European climb over 2000 meters.