The offended reaction to the star rider’s Flanders ruse risks eclipsing the bigger story.
Cor Vos
Remco Evenepoel is a world champion at more than just bike racing. He’s also apparently a rainbow jersey-clad master of misdirection. After almost four months of avowedly denying he would race the Tour of Flanders, Evenepoel dropped a nearly 20-minute YouTube video on Wednesday that mostly served to deliver a six-word announcement: He will race Sunday’s Tour of Flanders.
The kicker is that the video was recorded in December, just a couple of weeks after a team presentation where Evenepoel and his new Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team denied any interest in Flanders. They kept up that denial ever since, even as speculation rose to a new height earlier this week with reports – including on this website – that he would start on Sunday. This was always the plan; he’s just letting us in on it now.
It’s official: Evenepoel is racing Flanders. So what does that mean?
The double Olympic champion won’t be the top favorite, but he should be seen as a legitimate contender to challenge Pogačar and Van der Poel.
Whether Evenepoel and Red Bull decided to move up the announcement because of the speculation or had always planned the big reveal for April 1, that it fell on that date had some wondering whether the YouTube video – basically a longform sizzle reel accompanied by short social clips – was all just the next step in some elaborate April Fool’s hoax, to be concluded Sunday with, perhaps, a video of him at home raising a beer with his feet up while watching the race on Sporza with the rest of us.
The delight that Evenepoel would make his long-awaited Flanders debut was tempered somewhat by the elaborate long con itself, and the reaction to it. As journalist Daniel Benson recounted on his Substack, when Red Bull director Sven Vanthourenhout addressed the media outside the team bus at Dwars door Vlaanderen on Wednesday, the questioning was sustained and intense: Why had Evenepoel and the team consistently denied his interest in Flanders if doing the race had been the plan all along? Why, basically, did they lie?
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