Before Remco Evenepoel became one of the only cyclists ever to win the Grand Tour/World Championships double in the same season, he was a marauding fullback who captained Belgium’s under-16 football team and was considered one of Anderlecht’s brightest prospects.
‘The whole time, the whole game, he was really, really running,’ Bob Browaeys, Evenepoel’s Belgium under-16 head coach, says. ‘It was so natural, so normal. He was ready to run the whole time, offensively and defensively.’
Former coaches describe cycling’s new world champion as a box-to-box player who amazed staff and teammates alike as he set new marks in pre-season endurance tests and stayed after training for extra work in the gym and on set pieces.
‘For me, that’s the difference between a moderate player and a very good player,’ says Dennis Henderickx, KV Mechelen academy’s technical director when Evenepoel was at the club.
Evenepoel, now 22, was initially an ‘eight’ in midfield but was converted into a left wingback as he got older.
‘He had the best stamina of our players, but sometimes it’s a bit more about the tactics and that was something he had to learn,’ Stéphane Stassin, Evenepoel’s under-16 head coach at Anderlecht under-16, says.
It was only when Evenepoel left space behind him that forwards could get into, Browaeys explains, that he had to be corrected. Otherwise, he was like the coach’s right hand, a leader who captained both Belgium and Anderlecht at youth levels.
‘When I had individual talks with Remco, it was really about him wanting to know how he could become a better football player,’ Browaeys says. ‘He really wants to run, to work, and then [we’re] also speaking about nutrition and so on. He was a professional football player.’
Browaeys started in football as a goalkeeper in his native Belgium but is better known for his decades of service at the Belgian football association. He has coached the likes of Eden Hazard and Christian Benteke, and now heads his country’s youth development programme.
No one could touch Evenepoel in Wollongong. Photo: Con Chronis / Stringer via Getty
Evenepoel would likely agree with his former coach’s assessment.
‘My style of play was a bit similar to how I ride a bike – I had a big engine and tried to cover every blade of grass, and even though I didn’t have the best technique, I was still good with the ball at my feet,’ Evenepoel wrote in 2020.
That aggressiveness has not disappeared on the bike, at times for the worse.
In the 2020 Tour of Lombardy, Evenepoel suffered a career-threatening crash when he collided full speed with the sidewall of a bridge while descending the Muro di Sormano. The whiplash tossed him off his bike and the Belgian plummeted several metres into a ravine.
‘Terrifying,’ they called the fall in Italy.
Evenepoel suffered a lung contusion and a fractured pelvis, and did not race for almost a year. But that same tenacity on the bike is also what led the 22-year-old Belgian to his recent wins in Spain and Australia.
Evenepoel’s Vuelta a España victory was punctuated by an imposing individual time-trial win. In Wollongong, a devastating solo attack blew away the competition and earned him the rainbow jersey.
His feats in the last months mean that Evenepoel is one of only nine riders ever to win a Grand Tour and a world title in the same season. His impressive palmarès already included two Clásicas de San Sebastián, one Liège–Bastogne–Liège, one European road cycling time-trial championship, and one Belgian time-trial championship.
Photo: Valeria Mongelli / Contributor via Getty
For many Belgians, Evenepoel evokes memories of eleven-time Grand Tour winner Eddy Merckx. And while Merckx is also one of the only nine cyclists to complete that vaunted Grand Tour/World Championships double, the Vuelta was only Evenepoel’s first Grand Tour victory.
In the years to come, the competition will be steep — and with similarly long careers ahead of them. The likes of Tadej Pogačar (24) or João Almeida (24) could pose challenges now, with Carlos Rodríguez (21), Juan Ayuso (20) or fellow countryman Cian Uijtdebroeks (19) waiting slightly further down the line.
But Evenepoel has always been one to accept and embrace a challenge, no matter the occasion or sport.
‘We’d played a big game already on Saturday,’ Stassin recalls. ‘He’d already run a lot and we had another big game on Tuesday, so I told him to not do anything on Sunday.’
That was when Brussels’ renowned half-marathon was taking place.
The Anderlecht coach wanted his main man at full tilt for the important clash midweek, and he knew Evenepoel often went running or cycling ‘for 60 or 70 kilometres’ on weekends with his father Patrick, a former cyclist who finished second-to-last in the 1993 Vuelta.
Sunday arrived and Stassin was participating in the half-marathon for a charitable cause, so he started early. Hours later, when he was well into the course, a group of runners fizzed past him. A familiar voice yelled back, asking how Stassin was doing.
‘That was Remco, running like crazy again,’ he remembers. Evenepoel finished 13th despite not having prepared for the race.
The current QuickStep Alpha Vinyl rider had two different stints at Anderlecht. The first started when he was only four years old and lasted until he was 11, when Evenepoel joined Dutch giants PSV Eindhoven.
Most of the time, he and his father Patrick would make the long commute across the border. Over time, the constant trips from Brussels to Eindhoven wore on Evenepoel. When he was 14, he re-joined Anderlecht to be closer to his mother.
Evenepoel became one of his country’s brightest football prospects. High potential, not just high performance, as Browaeys points out. He was not the most technically skilled, but a steady and reliable hand with an infectious maturity and training ethic that belied his age.
The Vuelta champion was well-regarded at Anderlecht, regularly appearing in other teams’ scouting reports, and captaining Belgium’s youth setup (his most memorable game was a 3-3 draw against a Portugal side featuring Valencia midfielder André Almeida and ex-Liverpool winger Rafael Camacho).
‘I thought that Remco would never leave Anderlecht,’ Henderickx says.
But his career at the purple-and-white club eventually stagnated. His father got in touch with Henderickx, who led Mechelen’s academy at the time to gauge if there was any interest in his son from their side.
There was, but Evenepoel was only at Mechelen for a season. He dropped football for cycling and achieved quick success. As a junior, he once took 34 victories in 44 race days.
In 2017, he said he’d simply grown tired of the football world. There are hints of an unhappier departure from the sport, though.
Evenepoel has also said that ‘he got a disgust of football simply because of everything that happens inside the clubs’, and that Mechelen was close to offering him a professional contract, but ‘he had to be patient for another six months’.
His former teammate Vince Colpaert once posed that Anderlecht ‘acted childish’ and initially refused to release Evenepoel.
Photo: Photonews / Contributor via Getty
But the relationship between Evenepoel’s childhood club and his family remains strong. His father Patrick is a regular at their stadium, and his son took an honorary kick-off there last December.
The next time he returns, it will be as a dual champion. Maybe even more.
‘I’m very proud, he’s doing something special, and I love it,’ Browaeys says.
Main image: Maurizio Lagana / Stringer via Getty