Remco, Red Bull and the Ronde - Breaking down Evenepoel's Tour of Flanders chances

Back in 2019, Remco Evenepoel sat down with reporters in Québec near the end of his debut pro season and casually rattled off a laundry list of races he wanted to win before the end of his career. “The three Grand Tours... World Championships… The Olympics,” Evenepoel said, not as a boast but as a statement of fact. 

Evenepoel broke into a smile when someone piped up and pointed out that the Tour of Flanders wasn’t on the list, an unusual omission for a young Belgian rider with such grand ambitions.

“The cobbles don’t suit me,” he laughed. “I mean, the other week, I went for a ride near home. There was a Tour of Flanders sportive going on, and the course was marked out, so I started following the arrows, but after the first sector of cobbles, I just turned for home. I couldn’t do anymore. And the rain was too heavy as well.”

That aversion to the cobbles was well advertised and it endured through most of Evenepoel’s time at Soudal-QuickStep. Even amid the Ronde-centric crucible of Flemish cycling, there was general acceptance from media and fans alike that their most cherished race lay beyond their biggest star’s natural orbit.

In the early days of Evenepoel’s career, when his bike handling and positioning came under repeated scrutiny, there was no clamour for him to ride the Ronde. By 2022, when he started ticking Grand Tours and world titles off that list, it was clear that his focus lay elsewhere.

In 2023, when Soudal-QuickStep were enduring a disastrous cobbled Classics campaign, a rumour spread that Evenepoel would be parachuted into their Ronde line-up, but it turned out to be little more than fanciful social media fan fiction. Indeed, throughout his time in Patrick Lefevere’s court, it was generally clear that his responsibilities did not lie on the first Sunday in April. 

Since moving to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe this winter, however, there has been a discernible change in Evenepoel’s attitude to the Tour of Flanders. Speaking to Het Laatste Nieuws in a joint interview with Johan Museeuw ahead of their annual ‘Kristallen Fiets’ award, Evenepoel raised hopes in Flanders when he acknowledged that a Ronde debut was under consideration for 2026, which begs two questions – why now and what can Evenepoel realistically achieve in the race?

Evenepoel’s decision to break his contract with Soudal-QuickStep and move to Red Bull was the transfer saga of the summer, though the move played out far less fractiously than Juan Ayuso’s departure from UAE Team Emirates-XRG.

Even so, Evenepoel has still left a Belgian institution in favour of picking up a mammoth pay packet to help sell little tin cans of a sickly-sweet Austrian energy drink. It would probably do his image in his home country no harm to line up for Belgian cycling’s grandest occasion.

Still, a rider as talented as Evenepoel – not to mention a team as serious as Red Bull – surely wouldn’t take on a challenge like this simply for the optics. No, if Evenepoel lines up in Antwerp on April 5, it will be because he believes he can realistically challenge for the win in Oudenaarde. After such an anonymous Classics campaign in 2025, meanwhile, Red Bull have their own motivation for throwing Evenepoel into the mix. 

The idea of a rider of Evenepoel’s characteristics dropping into the Tour of Flanders with little or no cobbled Classics experience certainly isn’t as far-fetched as it would have been a decade or so ago.

There was widespread surprise in 2018 when Vincenzo Nibali elected to take on the Ronde after his dramatic Milan-San Remo win, and the Sicilian won plaudits for his attack in the finale, even if he was quickly overpowered by winner Niki Terpstra.

Nibali’s admirable display seemed only to cement the prevailing opinion that the rough and tumble of the cobbled Classics was something entirely different to the rest of the racing calendar. Knowledge of the terrain, an aptitude for the nuances of riding on the cobbles, sharp elbows and oodles of raw power were all essential elements to win the Ronde. Received wisdom said that a lightweight Grand Tour contender could never hope to develop those characteristics while simultaneously working towards the Giro or Tour.

Like a lot of received wisdom, that thinking has been blown out of the water in the 2020s by Tadej Pogačar. In 2022, Pogačar almost won his debut Ronde with just one outing at Dwars door Vlaanderen to get his bearings. A year later, he burnt Mathieu van der Poel off his wheel to win the race and he repeated the feat in 2025. The idea of a 66kg rider winning the Ronde seemed fanciful in the era of Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara, but the Slovenian is now on course for a record-equalling third win in 2026.

Pogačar’s astonishing power and the sheer difficulty of the modern Tour of Flanders route mean that the old tenets of positioning and intimate knowledge of the course are not quite as essential as they used to be. 

Cancellara, an avowed admirer of Pogačar, has also pointed to how modern bike tech has helped his cause by absorbing the worst of the bumps at the Ronde. In particular, the wider profile tyres of the 2020s have made it easier for the best riders on regular roads to transfer their gifts to the cobbles.

Those factors all apply to Evenepoel too. As Tiesj Benoot pointed out to Domestique this week, the modern Ronde route means that the strongest man generally wins in Oudenaarde, especially when Pogačar’s UAE squad ride to make the race as demanding as possible from as early as possible.

The winnowing process begins far sooner than before, meaning that the scramble for positions, while still important, is not as quite as essential at the Ronde as it is at shorter, more explosive races like E3 Harelbeke. Even with his limited experience on the cobbles, an in-form Evenepoel would expect to be in the mix come the final hour at the Ronde. In the long-term, his raw strength can offset most of his likely shortcomings in positioning.

Or, as Benoot put it, the finales of cycling’s toughest races are now generally the preserve of the ‘aliens’ of the peloton, almost regardless of the specifics of the terrain. At the Tour of Flanders last year, the hierarchy was clear – Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel were operating on another plain, with Mads Pedersen by a distance the best of the rest. 

It’s not fanciful to imagine Evenepoel among their number next April. And his penchant for solo attacks from distance and the efficiency of his aerodynamic position mean he could indeed pull off a long-range heist like that of his old teammate Philippe Gilbert in 2017.

And yet, while the new norms of bike racing in the Pogačar era make Evenepoel an immediate contender in a possible Tour of Flanders debut, there is an obvious caveat.

Rather than the Koppenberg or the Kwaremont, the positioning or the Paterberg, Evenepoel’s biggest obstacle at the Ronde is the very same one that denied him at the Worlds, European Championships and Il Lombardia – Tadej Pogačar himself.