Red Rick: I'd honestly say Evans was probably just short of being an absolutely elite finisher for that kind of threshold uphill sprint effort. Remember that he came up against the absolute peak years of Valverde, di Luca and Cunego MkI, then once he broke out of his shell it was the peak years of Gilbert and Purito.
Plus Roglic has probably the strongest team behind him now. In the mountains Evans was one man against stronger teams.
Lotto was hopeless. Neither good on paper support nor a supportive environment for Evans personality. That is what changed at BMC. Also remember Chris Horner was mediocre support for Evans and barely able to hold Cadel's wheel. For some reason that reversed when Horner left for Astana
. Liberty earlier in this thread as a non Cadel fan does a fair job of rating Evans ability and as mentioned by someone else physiologically Evans was a beast. Do you think Roglic is capable of doing what Evans did on stage 18 up the Galibier in 2011 TdF? Evans crushed a 8km test that day - pulled back over 2 minutes on Andy with no help. I like Roglic but this remains to be seen. With Roglic's strong team we may never find out.
Actually, it's hard to really agree with the first and last bit of the bolded. I think BMC was an environment that Cuddles thrived more in, but realistically the change was in him himself.
Lotto actually worked hard to help Evans, but because they were also committed to Hoste in the Classics, and would always want to fall back on stages with McEwen so brought him a helper or two too, they never gave him the 100% all-about-winning-the-GC team, I guess. But also, one of Lotto's biggest problems with helping Evans was a faulty crystal ball. They signed Horner... he killed himself for Evans but he wasn't good enough at the time, as a mere 36-year-old espoir. They signed Popovych and his running buddy Bileka. First Popovych perceived Evans as having slighted him and refused to work for him in Paris-Nice, meaning his motivation to help Cadel wasn't great, and then Bileka popped positive and suddenly Popovych was useless too (interesting that). They signed Thomas Dekker, but he was taken off the road and then suspended following a backdated positive. They swung for the fences and signed Bernhard Kohl to be option 1B and prime lieutenant for Evans after he finished 3rd in the Tour and won the polka dots... only he was a fraud too. By the time they signed Dani Moreno to back him up, Evans had had enough and moved on.
Now, the 2011-13 BMC teams might be pretty good, but let's be clear: that 2010 BMC team was worse than
any team Evans had had with Lotto. A few of them have gone on to be pretty good riders in time - Brent Bookwalter, Mathias Fränk, Alexander Kristoff - but at the time, it was effectively a mediocre ProConti team that had only had a couple of WT wildcards the previous year due to not having many riders of sufficient prominence in a strong ProConti crop at the time, but with Evans and Ballan grafted on top. By 2011 they were a bigger, stronger team adding the likes of Phinney, van Avermaet and with some of the younger guys getting better, but the 2010 Evans, riding for a worse team than he ever had at Lotto, was every bit as prominent as he was in previous years. Maybe his top end GC results suffered (he was only 5th in the Giro, he'd had a podium in each of the last three seasons, two at the Tour and one at the Vuelta) but he was getting more wins, and he was more prominent in races, like a man rejuvenated. He was carrying the rainbow jersey and he won Flèche Wallonne (after having been the strongest two years earlier but getting the timing wrong, he learned from his mistakes in 2010) and he won
that Giro stage.
To me personally, it felt like at Lotto he was the leader, but he didn't really feel at ease in that role, he always seemed to want constant affirmation that he was the leader (and he also made himself unpopular with his domestiques by criticising them publicly, at least implicitly) and would fire off the excuse cannon as soon as things went wrong and retreating into his shell (such as the 2009 Vuelta, where he got some misfortune, but then just sad by idly and didn't even try to attack Valverde at any point after that). At BMC, if things blew up in his face, he took action. It may have been the coaching / management style there, or it may have been his own psychology, but I think that the team support in terms of the riders they surrounded him with is a minimal factor there. Hell, it might even have been him suddenly realising that he was running out of chances to amass the palmarès that his talent suggested he should have, and the fact he succeeded in Mendrisio by taking a risk when he'd historically always been risk-averse emboldened him to go out and get those results proactively. I mean, I thought he'd blown his best chance to be a Tour winner in 2008. It would have been oh so easy for him to have missed out likewise in 2011. 2008 Evans was probably stronger than 2011 Evans, but 2011 Evans wasn't going to settle for being a bridesmaid anymore.