Remco Evenepoel

Evenepoel came to cycling from football, through the youth systems at PSV Eindhoven and Anderlecht and into Belgium's junior national sides. He quit the game in mid-2017, and eighteen months later held both junior world titles, road race and time trial, from the 2018 world championships. He skipped the under-23 ranks altogether, turned professional in 2019 and won the Clásica de San Sebastián at 19, the youngest winner of a WorldTour race.

The 2022 Vuelta a España made him the first Belgian to win a grand tour since Johan De Muynck in 1978, and he took the world road title at Wollongong three weeks later. Liège-Bastogne-Liège came in 2022 and 2023. At Paris 2024 he won the Olympic time trial and then the road race, the first man to take both at a single Games.

He went over a bridge wall on the Sormano descent at Il Lombardia in 2020 and fractured his pelvis. He was leading the 2023 Giro d'Italia, with two stage wins, when a positive COVID test removed him. In December 2024 he rode into the open door of a post van, breaking a rib, a shoulder blade and a hand, and did not race again until Brabantse Pijl the following April.

His wins mostly come alone. San Sebastián, both editions of Liège and the Wollongong road race were all solo, and the time trial has been the constant: three straight world titles from 2023 to 2025, the last in Kigali by 1:14 over Jay Vine, with a European title a week after it. In the highest mountains he has tended to defend rather than attack.

He was third at his first Tour de France in 2024. In 2025 he won the stage 5 time trial and held second overall into the Pyrenees, lost three and a half minutes to Tadej Pogačar on the Hautacam, and climbed off on the Tourmalet two days later while still third. He took silver behind Pogačar at the Kigali road race in September, by which point he had agreed to leave Soudal Quick-Step a year early for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe.