BarcelonaRemco Evenepoel (Aalst, 2000) is entering unknown territory, from now on. The young Belgian cycling star has never finished a big three-week race. The only time he had tried to do it, at the 2021 Giro, he couldn’t finish it. In the Tour, he still hasn’t let himself be seen and in this Vuelta, when he took the lead, more than one thought that it would be a summer flower, that it wouldn’t last long. But at the end of the first week, Evenepoel leads the race after a show of strength in the ninth stage, this Sunday. On the final ramp, he set a very hard pace and no one followed him.
But at 22, Evenepoel is causing debate. Loved or hated, there are those who believe he will be the great dominator of world cycling. Others believe he will never win a major race. When he opened the door to professional cycling in 2019 with a very promising debut, the rotary machines stopped in Belgium. No country lives cycling like Belgium and suddenly they had a slightly cocky young man who seemed up for anything. And the damn wheel of comparisons was set in motion, in this case with the great Eddy Merckx, the cannibal, which in the 60s and 70s won absolutely everything. Merckx, however, made it clear what he thought. “Evenepoel needs to be put down, don’t you think? He makes mistakes in a lot of attacks, he hasn’t won anything big yet,” he said in 2021.
A terrible fall
Evenepoel’s run was cut short in 2000 when, during the Giro de Llombardia, descending the Mur de Sormano, he went flying through a bend. He fell into the void, in such a fright that he came to think that he might never be able to compete again. After a few months of recovery, Evenepoel was able to compete again, but it was not until this year 2022 that a competitive version of the Belgian was seen, able to finally win a monument, as a group of classic one-day races are known. In this case, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, with a solo attack on La Redoute where he again demonstrated his bold, courageous, sometimes too crazy style. The triumph again sparked debates about what should be its fate. In Belgium, cyclists are as well known as footballers, they endure the same media pressure. Evenepoel knows this well: before he was a cyclist, he was a footballer.
When he won Liège-Bastogne-Liège, he did so with the Anderlecht crest emblazoned on his bike. For many years, Evenepoel was a footballer in the lower categories of the Brussels club, of which he is a supporter. Despite the fact that his father Patrick had been a cyclist, not very well known, he initially opted for the ball and reached the Belgian national team under 15 and under 16 playing as a winger. In fact, he went on to captain Anderlecht and left for Dutch side PSV Eindhoven in 2014, a club who felt he had enough of a future to bring him to live in their city, but after three years in which he did not managing to step forward, Evenepoel returned to Belgium when his mother fell ill. His life changed completely in 2017, when he decided definitively that he would not try to be a professional in football, despite the fact that he had an offer to go to Mechelen. He focused on being close to his parents and on the bike, which had always been in the background, on the memories of his father’s races, on watching the races on TV and on those days when he went out for a ride, when he wanted to to enjoy. “I got to do the pre-season with the Mechelen first team, but something had broken, I wasn’t happy anymore and my parents knew it,” he would remember. Already in 2017 he joined the Acrog-Pauwels Sauzen team, where he surprised by winning regional championships against young people who had been focused on cycling for years. It seemed like heresy for that boy who until recently was a footballer to come and defeat them. In 2018 he was crowned Junior European Champion and World Champion in the same category, leading to him being referred to as the new ‘Eddy Merckx’ for the first time. Evenepoel was amused, by the way. He wasn’t daunted by the pressure. In 2019 the Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl Team retained their services, confident that they were making a winning bet. They were right.
The fall of the year 2020, however, cut short its progression. For nine months he had to work intensely while at the races he was not homesick. He had earned a reputation as a bright but overconfident young man, with theoretically senseless attacks in places where no one else would. Evenepoel, yes. And every now and then it worked out for him. Before the accident, he won more than 50% of the races in which he participated. Already recovered, he was able to participate in the World Cup organized precisely in his home, in Flanders, in 2021. It did not end well. Merckx’s comments and debates in the press had opened the debate about who should be the Belgian star, whether he or Wout van Aert. In the end, Evenepoel pulled away from the group by sacrificing himself in a strategy that didn’t work, as the champion would end up being France’s Julian Alaphilippe. Evenepoel let it slip at the end that if he hadn’t sacrificed himself, he would have won. The tension within the Belgian team was evident and a meeting was arranged to discuss what had happened face to face. Evenepoel did not go. “It was a shame, everyone was there except him, who did talk to the television. His people should advise him better. They should lower his smokes,” said teammate Jasper Stuyven. 2021 was not a good year for young Evenepoel. The disappointment of the World Cup was added to his debut in a three-week race, at the Giro, where he showed himself in the first week entering the top ten. In the seventeenth stage, however, he collapsed and ended up falling, tired.
This 2022 Evenepoel has continued to focus on classic racing. He has won in San Sebastián and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. He has also won the Tour of Norway and that of the Algarve, five-day events. In the Tour of the Valencian Community he was second, preparing for this Vuelta a España where, at the moment, the favorites are behind him. The Slovenian Primoz Roglic, champion for the last three years, suffers every time the ex-footballer attacks. A curious duel, this one, since Roglic became champion of Slovenia in another sport, trampoline jumping, before opting for cycling. Two men who in 2015 wanted to be footballers and jumpers the other now compete on wheels. And Evenepoel aims to prove he can win long races. If he does, the debate over what he might do will once again disrupt the calm in Belgium’s bars. And all, under the happy gaze of Patrick, the father, who had participated in the Vuelta in 1993. He finished 113th. His son seems destined to make it better.
