REMCO EVENEPOEL - THE BOY WONDER

He won’t turn 20 until January next year, but Remco Evenepoel is not waiting to make an impact. 

The Belgian teenager is already a WorldTour one-day race win to the good, with his spectacular triumph in Clásica San Sebastián, and is the European TT champion. 

What more can he achieve? A lot, he thinks

58 Procycling / December 2019
Writer: Barry Ryan

To reach the start line of the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec, riders must scale the Grande Allée, the graceful street that rises stiffly behind the promontory overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. Most do so gently, twiddling their lowest gears. Remco Evenepoel reports for duty with more vigour, every sinew twitching as he bounds up the slope in the big ring.

At the start, Evenepoel draws up alongside Michał Kwiatkowski, who is distractedly adjusting his power meter, and he playfully thumps a fist in greeting on the ex-world champ’s stem. “How’s the form?” Evenepoel chirps. Kwiatkowski exaggerates a grimace and the youngster laughs heartily. Back in the 1990s, when Evenepoel’s father Patrick was a rider at Collstrop, a first-year professional typically wouldn’t dare approach a grandee of the peloton, but times change. Besides, Evenepoel is not a typical neo-pro.

Two days later in Montréal, he demonstrates as much when he rips clear on the Mount Royal Park circuit. There are still five laps to go, yet low-flying panic grips the bunch as soon as Evenepoel flaps his wings. The ensuing hurricane sees 20 or so riders scramble to bridge to him, though it takes them half a lap to do so. The move eventually peters out, but it is nonetheless instructive. Nineteen-year-olds don’t ordinarily elicit such frantic responses from jaded pelotons, but this isn’t an ordinary 19-year-old.

That much is evident when Evenepoel sits down with reporters in Québec City earlier in the week. Young riders thrust into the limelight tend to make courteous but hesitant interviewees, their attraction to the brightness tempered by their wariness of the flame. Evenepoel, by contrast, seems disarmingly comfortable in its glare. He wears the assurance of a man who didn’t necessarily seek fame but who is fully aware that it hasn’t befallen him by chance either.

Someone mentions Eddy Merckx’s assessment following Evenepoel’s victory in August’s Clásica San Sebastián, when he speculated that the teenager might go on to outstrip his own achievements. For over 40 years, young Belgian riders have been denying they are the Second Coming, but this isn’t any young Belgian rider.

“I read that he had said that,” Evenepoel smiles. “But my goal is just to be the best. I think that I have everything to do that, to be the best one day. You have to use the legs you have – and the head, too.”

FAST STARTER

Evenepoel’s brisk procession to the WorldTour could be condensed to a montage of spinning newspapers, their banner headlines trumpeting the latest Bunyanesque exploit of the youngster from Schepdaal, a dormitory town just west of Brussels. In fact, the distance travelled could be summarised in two sentences. On the first Sunday of April in 2017, the same day Philippe Gilbert soloed to victory at the Tour of Flanders, Evenepoel pinned on a number for the very first time at a junior race in Zoutleeuw. A little over 18 months later, they were team-mates at Deceuninck-Quick Step. The son of Agna, a hair stylist, and Patrick, who set up a plastering business after his short cycling career, Evenepoel had been an aspiring footballer until spring 2017. Between two spells at Anderlecht, he had a three-year stint in the Netherlands in PSV Eindhoven’s juvenile ranks, and he also represented Belgium U15s and U16s.

Frustrated by a spell on the sidelines at Anderlecht and a subsequent transfer to Mechelen that never got off the ground, Evenepoel snuffed out his guttering football career and turned his attention to his father’s sport instead. Despite an anonymous 75th place in that first outing, which came after just two weeks of training, Evenepoel’s footballing celebrity was enough to draw the curiosity of a local TV station, who aired a report on his abrupt change of discipline.

Just over a month into his cycling career, Evenepoel’s raw athleticism – aged 16 and dressed in Anderlecht’s away kit, he had run the Brussels half marathon in 1:16 – sufficed to earn him an invitation to a Belgian national team training camp in the Vosges. By the year’s end, he had already agreed to join Axel Merckx’s Hagens Berman Axeon squad once he graduated from the junior ranks.

Initially Evenepoel was confined to Belgium, but murmurs of his unrefined strength amplified across borders as he won 36 races out of 44 in 2018, most notably when he claimed the European junior title by 10 minutes after a solo break of almost 100km. Casual observers might have assumed a misprint in the results column. As if to make sure, Evenepoel put on another exhibition, this time before an international television audience, when he cruised to victory in both the time trial and road race at the World Championships in Innsbruck.

By then, Deceuninck-Quick Step manager Patrick Lefevere had already secured his services. He invited Evenepoel to the Tour de France, where he signed a contract to sign with the team in 2019, leaping directly from racing on restricted gears to competing in the WorldTour. A talent like this, Lefevere reasoned, would find U23 racing unduly constricting. The boy was outgrowing age grades quicker than most teenagers fray school uniforms.

Lefevere’s longevity as a manager owes much to his business acumen but the 64-year-old styles himself as a benevolent paterfamilias, a quality that convinced Evenepoel to ignore what he termed a “crazy big offer” from Team Sky. Even Lefevere’s tone-deaf public pronouncement that Evenepoel needed to lose weight did nothing to dissuade his protégé, who has since extended his contract until 2023. It helped, perhaps, that Lefevere had prior experience of handling young Belgian riders compelled to do their growing up in public, even if the careers of Tom Boonen and the late Frank Vandenbroucke would ultimately plot very different trajectories.

At first, however, the team’s blooding of Evenepoel looked set to follow the toe-dipping template laid down by Mapei almost two decades ago for Filippo Pozzato, the last rider of comparable profile to graduate directly from the juniors to the professional peloton. The initial plan was for the youngster to race sparingly, and largely Off Broadway, even if limiting his WorldTour outings would do nothing to dissuade the Belgian dailies from dispatching correspondents to follow the starlet to the ends of the earth.

It appeared that Deceuninck, to paraphrase what a record company mogul told Leonard Cohen in the early 1980s, knew that Evenepoel was great but were still unsure as to whether he was any good, at least when it came to rudiments such as riding in a peloton. Indeed, early in the year, they reportedly even explored the possibility of sending Evenepoel for extra tuition by racing with the Belgian U23 selection, though DS Davide Bramati now downplays his technical deficiencies.

“He’s up against guys who are 20 years older than him, so obviously they have more experience riding in a bunch, but he’s already learned a lot,” Bramati insists. “Soon he’ll be on the same level as guys of 38.”

Evenepoel enjoyed a solid start to senior racing with ninth place at the Vuelta a San Juan and a rambunctious cameo at the UAE Tour, but for the remainder of the spring, he shrank into the more subservient role expected of a neophyte learning his trade. There is, however, a fine line between nurturing a prodigious talent and smothering the virtuosity that defines him with unnecessary instruction. At the Tour of Norway in June, Yves Lampaert spotted that he was playing against type. 

“I had a lot of conversations with Yves, and he told me I needed to keep doing races the way I did them last year, because he saw that I was a little bit in the process of losing the sensation of winning,” Evenepoel says. On the next day’s stage, he spent more than 60km off the front before being caught in the finale. The disappointment was offset by the confidence regained. “That was where I felt I had something in me,” he says.

Lampaert’s counter-intuitive advice to revert to racing like a junior seemed to pay dividends, or perhaps it was the 3kg of puppy fat Evenepoel had reportedly lost since the start of the season. No matter, on his return from Norway, he dominated the Tour of Belgium, then won a stage at the Adriatica Ionica Race in July. There was already a saturation of superlatives by the time Evenepoel soloed to victory at the Clásica San Sebastián in August, but they were wrung out and repurposed when he claimed the European time trial later that week.

Even Roger De Vlaeminck, who routinely dismissed Boonen’s Paris-Roubaix wins as “third-rate”, was conspicuously enthusiastic when Het Laatste Nieuws hazarded a phone call. “I don’t know what it is with that little man,” De Vlaeminck said, “but he never really gets tired.” Perhaps it helped that, in the long term, Evenepoel views himself as a grand tour contender – nay, winner – rather than a one-day specialist. “I won a very hard race in San Sebastián and I won the European TT, and those are the tools you need to win a grand tour or to do a good GC,” Evenepoel says unabashedly. The competitive fare in his homeland, on the other hand, is not entirely to his liking.

“The cobbles don’t suit me,” he laughs. “The other week, I went for a ride near home. There was a Tour of Flanders sportive going on, and the course was marked out, so I started following the arrows, but after the first sector of cobbles,Ijust turned for home. I couldn’t do any more. And the rain was too heavy as well.”

THE MÉTIER

On the bike, Evenepoel’s dynamic style is reminiscent of a Boccioni painting, and off it, too, he exudes a certain restlessness. As a professional, he maintains it has been tougher to adapt to resting than racing. “The hardest part is the métier and the life outside of cycling, especially recovering after training,” Evenepoel says. “Last year, I was still at school. I’d train before and after school, do my homework and go to bed. It was always the same ritual. With the pros, it’s different. You really have to adjust yourself from week to week, and that’s something I’ve been learning.”

Though Evenepoel is coy about his training programme – “No details,” he jokes – he still needs convincing that less can be more. “You have to insist that a quiet day means an hour of riding, not three,” his coach Koen Pelgrim told Sporza after the European Championships. The Dutchman added that he had “never seen a 19-year-old who can do what Remco can do,” highlighting a preternatural ability to recover rapidly from sustained efforts and then repeat them. How? Pelgrim struggled to explain the phenomenon. “A combination of good genes, talent and hard work,” he offered.

Evenepoel’s precocity is not limited to his physical gifts. Off the bike, he carries himself with a disarming confidence that comes off as amiable rather than arrogant. “He’s a sunny, intelligent lad,” says Bramati. The unblinking eye of an expectant Belgian press, meanwhile, is accepted as an occupational hazard rather than dreaded as an impediment. He has dealt calmly with scrutiny of a prospective move to Monaco and politely corrected reports that he had demanded a place on Belgium’s Worlds team from coach Rik Verbrugghe. When an Italian publication spun a gossip column out of a newly-single Evenepoel’s Instagram likes, meanwhile, his tweeted response was to the point: “Just stop this bullsh*t, okay?”

In a column for Het Nieuwsblad during the World Championships, Lefevere admitted that he had hoped Boonen would not take the rainbow jersey in Madrid in 2005, so concerned was he that the young ‘Tommeke’ might not be equipped to handle the ever-spiralling demands of stardom. “Not wrongly,” wrote Lefevere, but he had no such qualms about Evenepoel’s ability to shoulder the burden. “I hope he wins the Worlds,” Lefevere wrote. “His hunger is about the last thing I’m worried about.”

LONG-TERM GOALS

Ultimately, Evenepoel would have to settle for silver in the time trial in Yorkshire, beaten only by a rampant Rohan Dennis. But if that was the umpteenth demonstration of his startling physical gifts, then his performance in the road race four days later was perhaps a more vivid showcase of his mindset.

When Gilbert, one of Belgium’s two leaders, crashed with 125km remaining, it was Evenepoel who waited with him and cajoled him into remounting. Gilbert, already a world champion seven years ago, had the mien of a man tacitly resigned to his fate, and so Evenepoel raged against it on his behalf. Beneath driving rain, he led Gilbert for two laps in a resolute but doomed pursuit of the peloton up ahead. Victory had already drained away; Evenepoel now seemed to be racing against the very idea of losing.

It was an adversary that could not be vanquished, of course, and he abandoned after Gilbert had pulled out, yet the quixotic effort felt a microcosm of his seemingly boundless ambition. A fortnight earlier in Canada, Evenepoel had been asked to outline his career goals. Rather than offer a fuzzy, faroff dream, he dashed off a focused laundry list of worlds he plans to conquer. “The three grand tours,” Evenepoel said. “The World Championships… The Olympics.”

He was smiling as he spoke, but it was clear he wasn’t joking.

PATH TO PRO

BELGIAN EVENEPOEL HAD SUCH A REMARKABLE RUN OF  RESULTS AS A JUNIOR THAT HE SKIPPED THE U23 RACING LEVEL ALTOGETHER AND SIGNED A WORLD TOUR CONTRACT

JUNIOR

• 1st La Route des Géants, 2017
• 1st La Philippe Gilbert, 2017
• 1st Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, 2018
• 1st National Championships junior TT andRR, 2018
• 1st Course de la Paix, 2018
• 1st GP Général Patton, 2018
• 1st European Championships junior and U23 TT, 2018
• 1st European Championships junior RR, 2018
• 1st Giro della Lunigiana, 2018
• 1st World Championships junior TT andRR, 2018
• 1st Chrono des Nations, 2018