Evenepoel’s Red Bull transfer turns up Tour de France pressure – Analysis

It’s hard not to think of Bradley Wiggins swapping Garmin for Team Sky in the winter of 2009, even if Evenepoel would never be so gauche as to compare his transfer to leaving Wigan for Manchester United. But no matter how it’s couched, leaving Soudal-QuickStep raises the stakes considerably for Evenepoel, just as moving to Sky heightened the expectation on Wiggins. Evenepoel has no more room for error.

Rightly or wrongly, the thinking seemed to be that Soudal-QuickStep had taken Evenepoel as far as they could on his path towards Tour de France glory. If anything, his promising 2024 debut might only have hardened that sentiment. At the very least, it left him wondering what he might achieve with the backing of a super team. Mikel Landa had raced to sixth, but Evenepoel’s squad had nothing like the depth of UAE or Visma.

Soudal-QuickStep, of course, had been retooled around Evenepoel in recent years. When he joined the self-styled Wolfpack as a teenager in 2019, he was just one potential winner among many in a team with the cobbled Classics in its DNA. Within four years, the entire operation had shifted to become an Evenepoel joint. Soudal’s sponsorship was initially contingent on his continuing presence, and the roster was gradually rebuilt to support his Grand Tour ambitions.

Evenepoel held up his part of the bargain by winning the 2022 Vuelta a España, where his supporting cast generally exceeded expectations, though it remained clear that both rider and squad still had adjustments to make if they were to take on Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard.

COVID-19 ruined Evenepoel’s 2023 Giro d’Italia bid, while a spectacular jour sans at the Vuelta raised old and largely unfair questions about his ability to withstand the rigours of three-week racing. Still, Evenepoel’s strikingly consistent 2024 Tour offered a solid retort to those doubts and provided hope for even better in 2025.

Instead, a heavy crash in December disrupted Evenepoel’s season. Although there was genuine optimism ahead of the Critérium du Dauphiné, his travails there and in his subsequent training camp meant there was already a sombre feel to his second Tour. An injury-depleted squad didn’t help the mood either.

Winning the Caen time trial was a false dawn. It was clear from Evenepoel’s struggles on the first two days in the Pyrenees that something was seriously awry and his abandon on the Tourmalet felt almost inevitable.

By then, rumours of Evenepoel’s imminent Red Bull move had long since hardened into something closer to fact. Evenepoel wanted out and Red Bull wanted Remco. It was simply a question of time – and, above all, it was a matter of negotiating the buy-out of the final year of his contract with Soudal-QuickStep to everyone’s satisfaction.

QuickStep didn’t exactly discover Evenepoel, who had essentially announced himself to the entire cycling world with a sequence of increasingly outlandish performances as a junior. But Patrick Lefevere’s team – now run by Jurgen Foré – did nurture him, fast-tracking him from the junior ranks to the WorldTour and tossing him the keys of leadership during his debut season.

The idea was that the team’s Grand Tour focus would grow in tandem with Evenepoel’s ambition, and that was the case for a couple of years at least. In time, however, the stockpiling of talent at a select cadre of elite teams shifted the goalposts, and it became clear that Soudal-QuickStep were never going to assemble a climbing group like those available elsewhere.

In the 2020s, Grand Tour victory has largely been the preserve of four teams. Of the 17 Grand Tours since 2020, Visma | Lease a Bike have won seven, UAE Team Emirates-XRG have won five, while Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and Ineos have claimed two each. The outlier is the 2022 Vuelta, won by Evenepoel.

Evenepoel’s decision to leave Soudal-QuickStep for one of their number was always likely. Ineos were a persistent suitor in 2022 and 2023, after all, while the touted Visma-QuickStep merger of late 2023 would have put Evenepoel on the same team as Vingegaard. Ralph Denk’s squad, flush with a cash injection from Red Bull, came to the fore over the past 18 months.

In the end, Evenepoel might have followed a reasoning that echoes his sporting background. Just as footballers with designs on the Balon d’Or tend to wind up at Real Madrid or Barcelona, Evenepoel figured that his Tour ambitions could only be served by joining a team with greater Grand Tour heritage than his own.

So what will the move do for Evenepoel and his Grand Tour ambitions? Straight off the bat, he will have a far deeper reservoir of support at his disposal. As things stand, Red Bull’s stacked 2026 roster will include Primoz Roglič, Florian Lipowitz, Jai Hindley, Dani Martínez, Aleksandr Vlasov and Giulio Pellizzari. Whatever way Red Bull divide up the calendar – and Evenepoel’s co-existence with Lipowitz will be subject to much scrutiny – the Belgian can’t have any complaints about the quality and quantity of climbing talent around him.

Helpfully, Evenepoel will stay aboard Specialized bikes next year and he will also have familiar faces on the staff. Klaas Lodewyck moves with him from Soudal-QuickStep, while former Belgian national coach Sven Vanthourenthout was already hired by Red Bull last week. Red Bull’s heftier budget, meanwhile, should have an impact on the training resources at Evenepoel’s disposal across the year.

And yet amid the changes, the principal obstacles facing Evenepoel remain unchanged: he has the misfortune of racing in the era of Pogačar and Vingegaard. Ultimately, no amount of resources might suffice to overcome those two barriers. Eddy Merckx is among those pointedly unconvinced by Evenepoel’s ability to operate in the same postcode as Pogačar.

Although Evenepoel, who turns 26 in January, looks to have greater margin for improvement than that pair, there was no indication that he had closed the gap in any meaningful way in 2025. If anything, the next generation – Lipowitz and Isaac del Toro chief among them – look to be closing in fast on Evenepoel. There is the ongoing sense, too, that his gifts would have been better suited to the more controlled Grand Tour racing of a decade ago than to the relentless slugging matches of the Pogačar-Vingegaard era.

Still, judgement on Evenepoel’s 2025 campaign is mitigated by his pre-season crash, and the raw materials that carried him to Vuelta victory three years ago remain in place. He is the most gifted rouleur in the world, he climbs better than most when at Grand Tour weight, and he recovers well across three weeks too, that 2023 Vuelta notwithstanding.

Both rider and Red Bull will hope that their partnership can refine those physical gifts still further and win a Tour de France over the course of this contract.
Evenepoel has never been afraid of the limelight and those close to him say that he loves the sense of mission that comes with preparing for the loftiest of goals.

There is none bigger than winning the Tour de France. And now, with the backing of Red Bull, there are no excuses. It’s all-in, sink or swim.
The pressure would break many, but it might be just what Evenepoel needs.