Remco Evenepoel is having a bit of a year of it: third at his debut Tour de France, back-to-back Olympic gold medals in the time trial and the road race, and all of that on top of rainbow stripes on the road (2022) and TT bike (2023).
That means the young Belgian – still only 24 years of age – has a lot of accoutrements to draw on in his outfits. At the Tour of Britain, which is his first race back of the season since the Paris Olympics and a period of justified celebration afterward, Evenepoel unveiled his new look. It is … a lot.
The Soudal-Quick Step jersey – itself not a particularly subtle one – is there in its normal form (as opposed to the team’s T-Rex-Quick Step guise, currently roaring its way around Spain). But then we get to the ends of the arms, which typically house national or World Champion stripes for athletes lucky enough to have achieved either distinction in the past. This year, Evenepoel gets rainbow bands on the sleeves of his road jersey, and is wearing a full rainbow skinsuit as reigning champ on the time trial bike: so what to do with a new golden design element added to the palette?
The answer, at least for the designers of Soudal-Quick Step’s clothing sponsor Castelli, is to just throw it all on there. That means: rainbow bands at the bottom of the sleeves, golden bands above them, more golden bands at the knees of the shorts, even golden details on the cuffs of his socks. If you thought past Olympic champs like Samuel Sanchez or Golden Greg Van Avermaet looked gaudy, they’ve got nothing on Evenepoel, who has rainbows and gold, followed by a chaser of Safety Jogger lapels and a smirking caricature of Napoleon on each shoulder.
It wouldn’t be a new kit day without a tussle with the UCI, and Evenepoel told Het Laatste Nieuws that there was a bit of resistance to the new design: “I had to fight for them quite a bit because the UCI insisted that the rainbow bands had priority, but luckily I got both,” he said. “I am really proud to wear this special kit. The last months have been an amazing part of my career and being the first man to win the double of the road race and time trial at the Olympic Games is something that dreams are made of.”
Do you think this stops with the clothing? Oh, how naïve: there are so many more things that can be golden than cuffs. Lest anyone else in the peloton forgets who they’re chasing, Evenepoel’s new jersey has his name on the back (underlined with – yes, you guessed it! – gold) while he’s hiding his painface behind a pair of new golden sunglasses from team sponsor Oakley.
And then we get to the bike, which is golden in much the same ways as most of these other things, which is to say, very much so. Specialized’s art department has rolled out a gold helmet and a golden Tarmac SL8 bike, the latter wearing a paintjob that adopts a gold-leaf-esque effect on the front end before transitioning to a smoother gold finish at the back, with a gold-coloured seatpost to match. Whether he gets an Olympics-commemorating time-trial bike and helmet from Specialized hasn’t yet been announced, but I think it’s probably safe to assume that there’s a bit more gold in the pipeline. In fact, why stop there? Why not shoes? Drink bottles? An obnoxious watch? A light 24-carat spritzing to cover his skin? When you have a suite of sponsors who want to celebrate your awe-inspiring and lucrative feats, why would you not push it to its giddiest extreme?
The trouble is, I suppose, that you have a big golden target on your back, making Remco Evenepoel – already one of the peloton’s most marked riders – an even more watched asset.
It’s early days, though – we’ll presumably have four years to get used to Evenepoel’s permutations of gold and rainbow and will doubtless see both at the front of many more races, adding to a string of victories that is already almost as dazzling as the increasingly gaudy outfits they give him permission to wear. And lest you think this is as elaborate as these kits can get: in the next three seasons our guy could – and probably will – snag a European road championship (or another Belgian title) to earn him the right to wear three championship signifiers simultaneously. The mind boggles.
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