Remco Evenepoel officially moves from Soudal-QuickStep to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe on January 1, 2026. Unofficially, the work is already well underway to turn the Belgian superstar into a rider capable of challenging Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard at the Tour de France, with the support staff analysing every facet of the 25-year-old’s performance in search of small but significant gains. That includes nutrition.
Here, we catch up with Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s head of performance nutrition, Stephen Smith, to serve up the science-backed fuelling strategies that he claims will not only shape Evenepoel’s season, but could also help recreational riders cook up a new PB in 2026…
Welcome to Food Coach
What will the move mean for the Belgian’s menu? Presumably, very little when it comes to the time trial. “I’ve been eating the same thing before a time trial ever since I was a junior,” the Evenepoel commented in 2023. “They are ‘pistolets’ with jam, a banana, some honey, half a litre of Fanta and slices of chicken fillet. It turns out to be a good meal to prepare for a time trial, because when I eat it, I almost never miss the podium.” A pistolet is essentially a bread roll.
Despite what the data might say about Fanta and its fuelling qualities, they’d be foolhardy to change something that’s historically given the Belgian such rapid wings. What Evenepoel will discover is that he has many experts to turn to in search of optimising each and every session.
“We’re lucky on this team as we have five nutritionists. Some teams might only have one,” says Smith, who recently took up that head of performance nutrition role after working across Red Bull’s Athletic Performance Centre for the past five years, where he fuelled a range of athletes from MotoGP riders to skiers, downhill mountain bikers to triathletes.
They’ll be in attendance at the team’s pre-Christmas training camp, where new riders will be introduced to the team’s Food Coach app. The app was originally developed in 2018 for Jumbo Visma (now Visma-Lease a Bike) in collaboration with Jumbo Supermarkets. The German-licensed team have been using it since early this year, arguably driven by Asker Jeukendrup, who formerly worked for the Dutch team where he contributed to the app before taking up his current position at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe as Director of Sport Strategy in October 2024. This, says Smith, provides the basis for ensuring riders have a rich and varied diet while…
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