Do we like them?

Do we like Cadel Evans?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record on harm, a long career with community work behind it, and not much else to mark him down on.

Cadel Evans was a mountain biking prodigy who rode dirt tracks from his early teens and was at the Atlanta Olympics at 19. He won back-to-back World Cup titles in 1998 and 1999, finished seventh at Sydney 2000, then switched to the road full-time in 2001.

The road years were all near misses until they weren't. He lost the 2007 and 2008 Tours narrowly, lost the 2009 Vuelta after a slow wheel change, then won the world title solo in Mendrisio that year. In 2011 he became the first Australian to win the Tour de France.

The one wobble in the story is doping-adjacent. In 2012 he acknowledged meeting the sports doctor Michele Ferrari, who was banned for life that year. Evans said the meeting was a fitness test, and that there was never any “sign of anything illegal”. Nothing in what we read shows a doping finding against him.

On the harm test, there's honestly not much to report. Searches on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, climate and vaccines turned up nothing in his own words or acts, and no culture-war grievance, conspiracy theories or dodgy collaborators. That's a clean sheet, with the caveat that he's a quiet public figure rather than a campaigner.

He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2013 for services to cycling and the community, and went into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in December 2020. He also lends his name to the Great Ocean Road Race, which now runs men's and women's events and which he still promotes.

Nothing new on him lately that we could verify. He's retired from racing and his main public work is that race and commentary on Australian cycling. In a 2025 interview he called the local racing scene “sort of disappointing” and said he wanted a stronger summer calendar.