At the 2021 World Championships in Flanders, Remco Evenepoel was at the front of the race gesticulating at his breakaway companions, trying to get them to pull longer turns on the front in the hope to stay away from a looming peloton. Throughout that day, Evenepoel was attacking at strange times and he wasn’t following team orders, angry and hot-headed. Rumour has it that he didn’t attend a meeting after the race where the rest of his teammates debriefed what had gone wrong for the home nation on that fateful day in Belgium.
Before that, it hadn’t been a straightforward season for the 22-year-old. His serious crash in Il Lombardia at the end of 2020 meant he didn’t start racing until the 2021 Giro d’Italia in May, and that hadn’t gone to plan either. It was on stage 16 of the race that Evenepoel dropped out of the top ten on GC, losing a mammoth 24 minutes to Egan Bernal on the Passo Giau.
On that day, Evenepoel blew up in a spectacular fashion; he was without the endurance base required of riders in a Grand Tour and was unable to pace his effort to limit his losses on the toughest climbs. He’d been showing cracks in his armoury before that too, memorably ripping out his ear piece on the stage 11’s gravel roads when he was briefly abandoned by his former Quick-Step teammate João Almeida.
Then, Evenepoel’s relationship with cycling’s media and fanbase was controversial too: the Belgian rider often showed confidence and assertiveness that some would say brinked on arrogance. Maybe it’s that he released his own self-named clothing brand at just 19-years-old or the fact he was incredibly open about how assured he was that he could win races, to put it quite simply: Remco really wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Unlike his teammate Yves Lampeart whose quote “I’m just a farmer’s son from Belgium!” went viral when he won the first yellow jersey at this year’s Tour de France, Evenepoel is far from the guy next door.
2022, though, has seen a monumental shift in the Belgian’s entire demeanour. Gone are those angry, brash reactions and here we are seeing a calm, collected GC rider who is exhibiting self-control by the bucket load. The 2022 Vuelta a España has, so far, epitomised the brand new Remco Evenepoel, both from a psychological and physical sense.
As the race reached Spanish shores and Primož Roglič took a win on stage four’s uphill finish in Laguardia, Evenepoel finished quietly down in eighth place, a…