So… listen to this… Belgium has run out of left backs… The only one who made it to the Euros was De Cuyper, who was so good, they’d rather play a center back in his position than give him a chance… but the real mystery is that… if you go back to around 2016 and watch their youth teams play… they had a left back… in fact, you will find that even with Jeremy Doku and Lois Openda in the squad, that left back was their captain… So why wasn’t he available for the Euros? Well… he was preparing himself for the Tour De France… cause he also happens to be a real contender for the best cyclist in the world… this is Remco Evenepoel and he’s one of the freakiest athletes you’ll ever see… It took him a year and a half between giving up on football, getting into cycling and being named European champion… we’re talking about a guy who, just as he seemed about to completely take over the sport… fell head first off a bridge and not only survived… but somehow became a better athlete because of it? Look… in this modern era of nearly superhuman specimens, we all know the chances of becoming a top level athlete are close to zero… so… to do it twice is just absurd… I guess you could argue that Michael Jordan played baseball or that Usain Bolt played football, but come on… they only got a chance because they were Michael Jordan and Usain Bolt… Remco was a different story… He joined Anderlecht’s academy at age 5 and another 5 years after that he was already the captain of his team, being named the best player at the Wasquehal youth tournament in France… At 11, PSV invited him to their academy all the way out in the Netherlands, and he took it… for a while, he actually made the roundtrip across the border everyday but eventually, he just left his parents behind and moved in with a host family… but even then, despite sharing the pitch with the likes of Jordan Teze and Mohamed Ihattaren, he still made it to captain and he would have probably stayed there for a long time… but, 3 years in, his mom got sick and that was just too much… he had to come back home… Regardless, once back at Anderlecht, it was about the same, he was captaining Jakub Kiwior, Lokonga and Saelemaekers, he was training along with older prospects like Tielemans and Batshuayi, it was even around that time that he began captaining the national team… but… Why?
What made him so good? Well, those who saw him play, often compare him to one of two players… N’Golo Kanté or Joshua Kimmich… as Bob Browaeys, the man who helped develop Hazard, said: “He always wanted to be better, to work harder, he obsessed about nutrition, at 15, he was a already a true professional… and in game, the whole time, he was always, always running”. .
. and he isn’t exaggerating… Everywhere, you’ll find stories of his teammates getting mad at him because he would literally run laps around them during their group run, it was frequent for his coaches to joke that he should have become a marathon runner instead… one time, his manager Stéphan Stassin, forbade him from running as he’d be playing 2 matches in 4 days and he needed him fit… but the morning after the first match, as the coach himself was running a half marathon, he heard someone go “hey coach, how are you doing? ” and by the time he looked back, Remco was already going past him… the kid finished 13th out of over 6000 people….
and it goes deeper… There have been rumors that he broke the club’s record for the beep test when he was still a kid… hell… when world cup finalist, Lucas Biglia was at the club, he literally outperformed him in their fitness tests… and… when his vo2 max stats came out, you know? the stats that show your body's ability to consume oxygen… the team doctors were shocked, claiming they “had never seen something like that”. .
. he had the cardio of a god… but that should not be a surprise to anyone… Remco is the son of Patrick Evenepoel, a former cyclist who was forced to retire early due to a heart defect, though not early enough to stop him from beating legendary German cyclist Erik Zabel in a race… even worse, this gets ignored by most people, but his great grandfather, on his mother’s side, was Frans Van Eeckhout, a 3 time national champion track cyclist who beat legends like Van Steenbergen and Jef Scherens, who held 10 world championship titles between them… in fact, it was his son, Remco’s grandad, who taught him how to ride a bike… in his own words: “Only a month after removing his training wheels, he wanted to ride a 50 kilometer race around Brussels, I told him it was too much, but he insisted… I let him go thinking it’d be a good lesson to learn… but he barely even stopped… when he showed up at the finish line, the ladies there thought we were cheating”. .
. but whereas his grandpa seemed to love this, Remco’s father didn't see it the same way… he insisted that the sport was too harsh on the human body, he kept telling him to forget about cycling and so, for a long time, he did… but about a year after coming back to Belgium…. Remco injured his hip, got sidelined for a long time and was told that the best exercise he could do to speed up his recovery… was riding a bike… which only added wood to the fire… Once back from injury, for the first time in his career, he had lost his place in the team and even though he kept on being called up to the national teams, even there, he was slowly pushed out to the wing, forced to become a left back, all of this started getting to him and so… desperate to get his place back, as Bob Browaeys would say: “he started playing too much with his heart and not enough with his brain”.
. . he began mistiming his runs, at times, it seemed all tactics went out the window, the more he tried to fix things, the worse they became… By the time he turned 16, he was “starting to hate the sport”, he just wanted to get out of Anderlecht, but even once first tier KV Mechelen came to him with an offer, willing to slowly bring him into their first team… Anderlecht refused to let him go, even though they had only allowed him to play 2 matches in the space of 6 months and that broke him… as he explained: “Football started to disgust me because of everything that happened inside the clubs… I was close to depression, I could barely even talk to anyone, I just lost my mind”.
. . by the time they let him move to Mechelen, he was so out of it, he had almost quit football entirely… things had hit a point of no return… Ever since his injury, he had taken on cycling as sort of an escape from the football world… He would ride into the forest and hope the quiet would calm him down and one day it hit him… it was there that he felt the happiest, in his own words: “I said to myself: “Either you do your training and you go for it, or you take your bike, go back home, and change sports, your life, everything… I think it was the best decision of my life”.
. . That day, he got home and afraid to tell his parents about it, he called his father’s old coach, Fred Vandervennet, a 3 time Belgian marathon champion, and told him: “I want to do some cycling but my parents can’t know about it”.
. . at first, Fred was hesitant, he didn’t wanna go behind his friend’s back but he decided to give a kid a chance and on their first ever training session, the kid took his father’s old road bike without his knowledge and finished it with an average speed of 34 km/h despite the fact Fred insisted he had awful form and was “one of the worst downhill riders I’ve ever seen”… before you knew it, he was already signing him up for a race and insisting he had to tell his parents about what was going on, but before he could even do that, they were the ones who confronted him about his strange behavior… to which he said: “Call Fred, he’ll explain everything”.
. . and about 10 minutes later, his father was hanging up the call, saying: “Fred, I think we have a cyclist”.
. . Just days later, on his first ever race, wearing a black jersey with no sponsors, Remco came in 10th in a time trial, only 50 seconds off the winner despite riding in a bike… with road handlebars… After only a few weeks, a junior team had already brought him into their roster, despite the fact he was scared of riding in the peloton and kept crashing in every race… matter of fact, just one month into his time there, he even ended up breaking his nose… in a way, at first, he was actually resented by his teammates, who kept asking “why is this football player even here?
”. . .
but then, in only his tenth race, he took his first victory… even more impressive, a month after that, he showed up to an event with a cake and champagne, they asked why, and he replied: “Today is my father’s birthday, so I wanna make sure to win this one for him”. . .
and he did… by the end of the year, he had already taken 7 wins, which, as one interviewer pointed out “is more than a lot of riders ever get”. . .
so, the next year, he dropped out of highschool, moved to a better team and it’s hard to even explain this… When Remco went into the junior national championships and won both the time trial and road race in one go, it was impressive… When he went into the European championships, and did the same, finishing the road race with a 10 minute lead over the second place finisher, it was just shocking… but then, then came the Junior World Championships… Look, I’m not even gonna bother talking about the time trial… he won it… The thing was the road race… Wearing unlucky number 13 on his back, in classic Remco style… he crashed among the peloton… but what was worse, was that his team messed up and took the longest time out of everyone to bring him a replacement bike, completely killing any chance he had of winning… or at least, that was what everyone assumed… Instead, he battled his way back to the front with such relentlessness, he ended up riding the final 20 km by himself, with no one even close… getting to the finish line and causing a lot of controversy, celebrating by rubbing his chin as to call himself the GOAT, in reference to Cristiano Ronaldo’s world cup celebration at around that same time… going up to the press at telling them: “When a footballer scores a goal, they can do all they want… Why can’t a cyclist celebrate a win? ” and then adding that: “Football may have not helped me with the physical side of cycling, but it helped me with the mind games during the race, it taught me how to crack your opponents, to make it look like I’m not suffering even when I might be”. .
. and speaking of football, by the end of that year, when the Belgian Promising Athlete Of The Year award was handed out, even though, before, it had gone to the likes of Origi and Lukaku, it didn’t go to any of Remco’s former teammates, no… it went to the man they were now comparing to the greatest cyclist of all time, to the one they were calling “the next Eddy Merckx”. .
. Remco Evenepoel… After all of this, it seemed like there was no stopping him… shortly after, he signed with Quick-step and perhaps as a reaction to what had happened in his football career, he chose to skip the under-23 rank entirely and go straight into the pro circuit… The hype around him was so absurd, that despite being teammates with Philippe Gilbert, a former world champion, he was the one hogging the spotlight… The media was so crazy about him, they went into his old high school to track down his girlfriend… and yet, that was before he went into the San Sebastian classic as the first World Tour rider to have been born in the 21st century… then winning it, becoming the third youngest in history to ever do such a thing… taking another win at the European Time Trial championship just 5 days later, going into the World Championship, even taking the lead early on but ending up second… only narrowly missing out on the rainbow jersey, despite being a teenager… a feat so impressive that, once more, even though the winner Rohan Dennis had become the first rider in almost 10 years to retain the title, Remco was the one seen as the star of the show… meaning that when the time the came to name the Belgian Athlete Of The Year, he got to take the award straight out the hands of Eden Hazard… announcing to the country that his plan for the next year was to sweep everything, taking the Liege Bolougne Liege monument, the Olympic games gold medals, the world champions… and to then, to finish it all off, by winning Il Lombardia… there was only one problem… As Remco began his year in the best form of his career, quite literally winning every race he entered… the pandemic shut down all sports activities… and by the time things got back to normal, the whole schedule had been messed up… now… Il Lombardia came first… On the 15th of August 2020, as Remco went down the Muro Di Sormano, one of the fastest and most technical stretches of the professional circuit, he went wide on a narrow turn onto a bridge and ended up colliding with a low stone wall, leaving his bike behind and being shot head first down the ravine… as the commentators watched this happen, everyone remained quiet… it was more than likely that he was dead… As the first few people arrived at the site, they found his bike lying against the wall almost as if nothing had happened, but once they looked down from the bridge, they found Remco laying on the bushes 9 meters below them… his fall had been equivalent to falling from a 3 story building… had he met the wall a couple meters ahead, at the bridge’s highest point, he would have died… had those bushes not been there, he would have died… regardless, complaining of pain all over his body, they immobilized him completely, sent him to an italian hospital to spend the night and then moved him to Belgium where the the diagnosis came out… a fractured pelvis, a double fracture of the pubic bone, a heavy hematoma on his left lung and internal bleeding around the head of his femur… had they not discovered this as early as they did he would have bled to death… had his pelvic fracture been one millimeter to the side, it would have severed a nerve and left him paraplegic… No matter what, his recovery wasn’t easy… not one bit… For the longest time, it hurt him to even sit on a bike, let alone ride it… and by the time his bones had healed, his muscles had atrophied… forget riding a bike, he had to learn to walk again… there was serious worry that he would never be able to compete again… Even once they announced his return, they had to keep postponing it with his recovery suffering setback after setback… At one point, once he was finally able to get on a bike… he pushed himself so hard, he reopened the fracture… When he finally came back, there were no expectations, no guarantees that he’d be able to perform… just the fact that Il Lombardia wasn't his last ever race was a miracle… Once he was standing at the starting line at the Giro d’Italia, there were tears in his eyes… Even after a 7th place finish, the man once known for settling for nothing short of greatness could only say “I’m really, really happy”. .
. and though another crash in stage 17 would force him to abandon the race once more… only a few weeks after that, with his Belgium Tour title at stake, he went straight into day one with only one motto: “attack, attack, attack”. .
. and won it all proving to himself that this wasn’t the end… and even if for the rest of the year, he’d have to stomach the fact that he simply wasn’t ready for that level of competition yet, finishing 9th in the time trial and 49th in the road race at the Olympics… at least, he had one thing on his side… now he had 4 years to mount his comeback… and no matter how much it’d hurt to claw his way back to the top, as he had already said: “since the day I was born, I’ve always liked to hurt myself if that means pushing my limits even further”. .
. and, by April of next year, Remco was already writing names off of the list he had made before his injury, winning the Liege-Bastogne-Liege monument, in his first ever participation in a cycling classic, tallying up an average speed of 42 km/h, the fastest in the competition’s history, going up to the cameras and telling them that: “I’ve been on a roller coaster, when my career started, I kept surprising myself time and time again by the things I was able to do… After the fall, everything was different, I had to find myself again, I wasn’t the Remco I wanted to be… I found myself crying without knowing why… Today, I found the true Remco”. .
. but I dare say, he found a new one… Before the fall, there was one major downside to his game… time and time again, he was criticized for his performance on steep climbs, but now, having been forced to completely transform his body in rehab, as he said it himself: “I’ve developed a new kind of muscle, it allows me to be more explosive on climbs… I’m a new kind of rider”. .
. his hardest moment had quite literally made him tougher… and so, by the end of the year, even with Roglic, who had won all 3 previous editions, going up against him… even with Remco himself setting his expectations low and insisting he was only shooting for a couple stage wins… he arrived at the final stage of the Vuelta A España in first place and with an uphill stretch between him and glory, not only did he keep his lead, he extended it even farther, not just achieving his dream of winning a Grand Tour… but proving that he really had become a different beast, that he was coming for everyone… as the commentator said the moment he went past the finish line: “The bell rings and it calls on everybody else… My mountain, my race, my jersey”. .
. and that was before he went on to take back his title as the time trial and road race World Championship , becoming only the 4th rider in history to win a monument, a grand tour and the world championships in the same year… the other three. .
