In the time-honoured advertising ritual in the immediate aftermath of the Super Bowl, the most valuable player is ushered over to a television crew and asked the traditional question: “What’s next?” The answer, generously compensated, is the same every time: “I’m going to Disneyland.”
The same query invariably emerges at some point after the elite men’s road race at the UCI Road World Championships, when the newly crowned champion is asked to outline when he will show off his rainbow bands for the first time in competition. Like Disney, the organisers of late-season Classics are usually willing to pay for the honour, after all.
Remco Evenepoel, however, has insisted that he will not pin a race number on his rainbow jersey until 2023 after an intense six-week period that saw him add the Vuelta a España and Worlds road race to his earlier triumph at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, thus completing the most remarkable treble this side of 1999.
“The plan was to put the bike aside. But now that I am world champion, I think I also want to train for another week,” Evenepoel said in Wollongong. “And I can’t wait to show this beautiful jersey for the first time in a race next season.”
The appointments on Evenepoel’s calendar from here to the end of the season are, in any case, formal rather than competitive. On October 2, he will be feted at a reception on Brussels’ Grand Place, arranged to honour Belgium’s first elite men’s world champion in a decade and first Grand Tour winner in 44 years. The occasion, like everything is Evenepoel’s gilded career, seems singularly unlikely to be low-key.
“I hope there will be a lot of people and that it won’t rain that day, so we can make it a beautiful moment. I love that my city wants to honour me,” Evenepoel said of what he called his “balcony moment.”
That reception would appear to rule out any prospect of Evenepoel donning his rainbow jersey at the previous day’s Giro dell’Emilia, while RCS Sport will be disappointed to learn that a duel against Tadej Pogačar at Il Lombardia the following week was already long out of the question. Evenepoel will marry his partner Oumi on October 9. He laughed at the notion of giving his rainbow jersey an outing there.
“You’re giving me an idea… I’ll ask Oumi if she likes that,” Evenepoel said according to Het Nieuwsblad. “But I still think I’m going to have to go get a real suit. I put that pressure entirely on my mother.”
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