Almost a decade after Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe brought in their last superstar, Peter Sagan, who raised them to a new level, team boss Ralph Denk is hoping that the arrival of Remco Evenepoel can have the same effect.
Sagan’s arrival at Bora in 2017 coincided with their step up to the WorldTour, and with him came new levels of success; the team’s win tally jumped to 33 in his first year, and he won some of the biggest races, including Paris-Roubaix, several stages of the Tour de France and at the World Championships.
And it wasn’t just Sagan’s own results that he brought in, but with his reputation preceding him, most of the pressure was on the Slovak to deliver, allowing for their other riders to develop without the spotlight and the team to find its winning peak in 2019 with 47 – only four of which came from Sagan.
Obviously, Evenepoel is a different beast from the versatile sprinter and one-day star that three-time world champion Sagan was, as a GC rider, time trial specialist and hilly Classics contender.
Their racing styles aren’t particularly similar either, with Sagan’s playful showmanship contrasting nicely against Evenepoel’s calculated brutality, especially against the clock, but what they share is excellence, arriving at Denk’s team as one of the very best riders in the world at the time.
“First, when Sagan came in, it was our first year in the WorldTour. It was an adventure, and on the other hand, there were some very good learnings for me, because Sagan was our front man and leader, and he took all the pressure from the others,” recalled Denk at Red Bull’s media day in Mallorca last week.
“In his slipstream, we developed Emanuel Buchmann, Sam Bennett, Pascal Ackermann, and a lot of others, and they became pro in our infrastructure, and they are really successful.
“We can see now when Remco arrived, that took pressure even maybe from Florian [Lipowitz] – OK, the Germans are aiming high for Florian – but Remco is the Olympic champion, a world champion.
“An example is 2019: our best year in terms of victories with 47, and just four were won by Sagan, the rest were all the others: Schachmann, Buchmann, Ackermann, Bennett, guys like that, and this is what we are hoping now will have similarities.”
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