Do we like them?

Do we like Remco Evenepoel?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up and there's some real good, but the pages we could open were few, so we've held back from a higher mark.

The latest from Remco Evenepoel is a bumpy day out rather than a scandal. At the Montreal road race worlds he was dropped early, fought back and attacked late, then finished 12th while Brandon McNulty took the rainbow jersey. He also copped a 500 Swiss franc fine and lost 25 UCI points for disposing of waste outside the designated litter zones.

The messier story was off the bike. In 2025 a Sporza journalist made on-air remarks about Evenepoel's in-laws, and Evenepoel hit back on Instagram, calling the comments “absurd and disrespectful”. The journalist said his words were misinterpreted and that he never meant to criticise Evenepoel. A VRT ethics committee found no journalistic error, calling the words perhaps unfortunate, and the broadcaster opened its own misconduct inquiry, with no result reported in the article we read.

On the harm check, we searched for anything he has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and for who he keeps working with. Nothing turned up in the pages we could open, and we couldn't read many. In the one off-bike row we read, he was the one defending family from remarks made about them, which is not a mark against him. That's honestly the whole list, so treat it as a pass on what we found, not a deep audit.

The good stuff is the R.EV Brussels Cycling Academy, which he launched in 2023. It's a social project to get bikes to children in Brussels who can't easily afford one, with bicycles donated in partnership with Specialized. He said the aim isn't for kids to become pros but that “they discover the bicycle”. His stated long-term dream is a kid from the academy riding the 2030 Worlds in Brussels.

Put together, you've got a world-class rider who sometimes cops a fine, sometimes picks fights in public, and has put his name and effort behind getting poorer kids on bikes. The litter fine is a rules-of-the-sport matter, not a character one. We couldn't open pages on his other disputes, so we won't weigh in on those.