Remco Evenepoel's Tour de France is a referendum on his future

Leonard Cohen’s record sales didn’t match his critical acclaim until late in his career, and that dichotomy was brought into focus in a meeting with CBS Records in 1984. When the record company passed on releasing Various Positions, president Walter Yetnikoff reached for a curious formula to justify the rejection: “Leonard, we know you’re great; we just don’t know if you’re any good.”

That same paradox has seemed to follow Remco Evenepoel around for his entire career. His ability was evident from his sequence of outsize displays in his debut season back in 2019, but persistent murmurs about the gaps in his armoury have been a companion across the years, despite world and Olympic titles.

Even though Evenepoel has repeatedly delivered performances that could accurately be described as great, it seems there has often been a vocal constituency still ready to query whether the Belgian was actually any good at some specific aspects of the sport.

When Evenepoel jumped directly from the junior ranks to the WorldTour, for instance, there were questions over his bike-handling skills, and it was rumoured that Quick-Step would send him to race with the Belgian under-23 team for extra tuition in the rudiments of riding in the bunch.

Even after Evenepoel won the Vuelta a España in 2022, there were prominent voices adamant that he wasn’t really a stage race rider at all – among them Claudio Chiappucci, winner of a grand total of zero Grand Tours in his career.

Not even finishing on the podium of a most high-octane Tour de France on his debut in 2024 would suffice to convince the Remco-sceptical of his bona fides over three weeks. He was still several rungs below Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, after all, and his abandon at last year’s Tour seemed only to underline the old doubts about his aptitude for Grand Tour racing.

It didn’t dissuade Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe from completing their blockbuster deal to prise Evenepoel away from Soudal Quick-Step last summer, however, and it did nothing to dampen the ambition of the rider himself.

Evenepoel joined Red Bull with the express aim of trying to win the Tour, and not even RCS Sport’s pitching of a most amenable Giro d’Italia route could distract him from that mission. Despite all the doubts over his ability to last the course – or maybe even because of those doubts – Evenepoel has gone all-in on the Tour in 2026. 

Pogačar is the record-chasing favourite and Paul Seixas will carry the weight of an expectant nation, and yet nobody will set out from Barcelona with anything quite like the same pressure as Evenepoel. 

This Tour isn’t simply about the success or failure of his 2026 season; it’s a referendum on his future.

Evenepoel’s Grand Tour career has oscillated between extremes. His debut at the 2021 Giro was a spectacular gamble, given that it was his first race after fracturing his pelvis at Il Lombardia the previous year, and it didn’t pay off. His GC aspirations floundered in the second week, and he abandoned after a crash in the third.

It was the first failure of Evenepoel’s young career, and, as he so often does, he absorbed the lesson quickly. Evenepoel was altogether better for his second three-week outing, the 2022 Vuelta, and he made a fast start before carrying the maillot rojo to Madrid to become Belgium’s first Grand Tour winner in 44 years.

Evenepoel looked destined to do the same at his second tilt at the Giro in 2023, but a bout of COVID-19 forced him out while wearing the pink jersey. He added the Vuelta to his programme to compensate, and he looked the only challenger to Visma’s hegemony before his spectacular collapse on the Aubisque on stage 13.

Ever the showman, Evenepoel recovered to win at Larra-Belagua the following day, and he spent the final week engaging in long-range attacks of escalating ambition, placing 12th in Madrid. 

That costly jour sans, however, cemented the idea of Evenepoel as spectacular but unreliable over three weeks, a formula neatly articulated by Movistar manager Eusebio Unzué ahead of the Belgian’s Tour debut in 2024. “Remco can win the Tour, but only if he rides like Remco for 21 days out of 21,” he said. “If he only rides like Remco for 20 days out of 21, then it’ll be difficult.”

As it turned out, Evenepoel made it through those three weeks in France without any real fluctuations. He was consistently the third-best climber in the race, even finishing inside Marco Pantani’s 1998 record when Pogačar put the race to bed with a supersonic display at Plateau de Beille. 

He never really looked like discommoding Vingegaard, far less Pogačar, but the expectation was that he would build on that foundation in 2025. Victory in the Caen time trial in the opening week last year proved a false dawn, however. Once the road climbed, Evenepoel was in evident difficulty, and he suffered the indignity of being passed by Vingegaard at the Peyragudes mountain time trial.

It was clear that something serious was awry, though it says something about the baseline of Evenepoel’s talent that he still lay third overall when he finally pulled the pin on the endeavour on the Tourmalet the next day.

That baseline was the starting point for Red Bull’s Evenepoel project, though the early phase has been uneven. Evenepoel started his Red Bull career on a buoyant note, leading his new squad to victory in the team time trial at Challenge Mallorca and then tacking on two solo victories of his own before dominating the Volta Valenciana.

The early optimism was tempered by a subdued 10th overall at the UAE Tour, which meant he had now gone three full years without a WorldTour stage race win. An anticipated duel with Vingegaard at the Volta a Catalunya didn’t quite materialise either, with Evenepoel finishing the week a distant fifth overall after ultimately riding for his Red Bull teammate Florian Lipowitz, casting doubts about his place in the internal hierarchy for July. 

Yet even then, it was hard to extrapolate too much meaning from the performance, and not only because Evenepoel had crashed in the finale of stage 3. It soon emerged that he had also spent the spring preparing for a not-entirely-secret Tour of Flanders debut, and that placed his climbing travails in a different light.

Evenepoel’s defiant third place at the Ronde highlighted his class, as did his victory at Amstel Gold Race two weeks later, but confidence in his ability to challenge at the Tour was dealt a fresh blow at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, where he couldn’t live with Pogačar and Paul Seixas on the Redoute. Winning the sprint for third place did nothing to offset the disappointment of the afternoon.

A spring that teetered between new hope and old doubts ultimately prompted a rethink of Evenepoel’s Tour build-up. He was initially slated to ride the rebranded Dauphiné alongside his Tour co-leader Lipowitz, but Red Bull instead opted to withhold him from racing altogether until the Grand Départ on July 4.

It’s not clear if Vingegaard’s old coach Tim Heemskerk, recently added to the Red Bull coaching ticket, had anything to do with the revision to Evenepoel’s programme. In conversation with Domestique last month, chief of sports Zak Dempster couched it as a return to an old template for the team’s new signing.

When Evenepoel won the Vuelta in 2022, his last stage race was the Tour de Suisse more than two months earlier. Rather than race the Tour de Pologne or the Vuelta a Burgos, Evenepoel preferred to work in a controlled environment as he built towards the Vuelta.

The experience of 2025 surely informed that call, given that Evenepoel appeared to have been pushed too far by a high-octane Dauphiné in June, never really recovering for July. Above all, it seems that Evenepoel’s efforts to pare himself down to his ideal climbing weight for his Grand Tour objective are an annual balancing act, and he hasn’t always found the right equilibrium. He got it just right in 2022 and 2024, but he may have pushed things a touch too far a year ago. 

“We approached the weight loss intelligently,” Evenepoel said of this year’s approach, but he knows only too well that pre-Tour talk is just that. The proof will come in the racing.

Evenepoel signed for Red Bull in the hope that they could support his Tour ambitions in ways that he felt Soudal Quick-Step could not. His expectation is that Red Bull’s resources and expertise can help him iron out the inconsistencies that have dogged his Grand Tour career to date, and he was bullish about the work he carried out in May and June to that end. 

“I do not need to race to become ready for the Tour,” Evenepoel said last week. “I can reach the necessary level through training.”

The trouble for Evenepoel is that the necessary level keeps creeping inexorably upwards on Pogačar’s watch. There is no shame in racing in Pogačar’s shadow, of course, but the more pressing concern for Evenepoel is that the level of the chasing pack is rising rapidly too.

Vingegaard’s Giro d’Italia victory suggests that he remains Pogačar’s closest competitor, while Seixas has suddenly put himself forward as his most likely future challenger. Lipowitz’s steady ascent means that Evenepoel isn’t even the outright leader of his own team for this Tour, while Isaac del Toro and Juan Ayuso have also shown far more than the Belgian in stage races so far this season. 

The route features far less time trialling than Evenepoel would have liked – a 19km team time trial on the opening day and a 26km individual test on stage 16 – but his progress will be measured by how he fares in the mountains in any case.

It sets up a Tour where Evenepoel somehow has everything to prove and yet an awful lot to lose. For many, that kind of pressure would prove almost paralysing, but Evenepoel has always seemed to draw energy from proving a point.

He took up cycling at 17 in response to the realisation that his fledgling football career was fizzling out, after all, and his life on two wheels has followed a familiar pattern of bust and boom ever since. Every devastating setback seems to spark a defiant comeback. 

We know Evenepoel is great, but we still don’t know how good he can be at the Tour. At 26, he knows it’s time to show it. A big month in the Remco-verse awaits. 

Also read
How the ghosts of Pogacar's Tour past and future are driving him
One battle after another: Vingegaard still leads resistance to Pogacar at the Tour