How Remco Evenepoel Trains (the Ex-Footballer With a Legendary Engine)

Remco Evenepoel is the rider people reach for when they want to talk about a big engine. Olympic time-trial and road-race champion in the same 2024 Games, the first man ever to win both, and a rider whose sustained power against the clock is his signature weapon. He's also the rider whose VO2max gets quoted at parties, usually as a number nobody can actually source. He's a good case study in two things at once: how time-triallists train to a wattage, and why you should be sceptical of the headline physiology figures attached to famous athletes.

From football to a bike

Evenepoel didn't come up through junior cycling. He was a promising youth footballer at Anderlecht and PSV, captained Belgium at under-16 level, and only switched to cycling around 17. That matters, because it's an argument that a trained young athlete carries a transferable aerobic and competitive base between sports, and it's the same theme that runs through Primož Roglič's even more extreme ski-jumping-to-cycling switch.

His career also contains one of the sport's harder comebacks. A 2020 crash at Il Lombardia, where he went over a bridge wall and fractured his pelvis, could have ended things. He was winning the Vuelta and the World Championship road race by 2022.

Training to a number

Evenepoel is a power-meter rider in the purest sense. His time-trialling is built on holding a known, sustainable wattage rather than racing on feel, with reported threshold figures in the region of 420 to 425 watts during Tour preparation. The whole discipline of the individual time trial is pacing: go out at a wattage you can hold for the full distance, and don't let adrenaline push you past it in the first five minutes. That's a principle that scales directly to amateurs, and it's what an FTP or critical power number is for.

His preparation leans on altitude camps, where lactate testing confirms his zones, though his long-time coach has made the useful point that altitude doesn't help every rider equally and has to be judged case by case rather than applied as dogma.

The VO2max you keep hearing about

Now the myth. You will see Evenepoel's VO2max quoted anywhere from the mid-80s to the low-90s in millilitres per kilogram per minute. Treat all of it with suspicion. There is no publicly released, team-verified lab measurement. The circulating figures are a mix of loose reporting and enthusiasts reverse-calculating from his race power with an estimation formula, which is not the same thing as a test. He is obviously an extraordinary aerobic athlete. The specific number is folklore.

This is the third time in this series we've had to say that, after Kilian Jornet and Kristian Blummenfelt, and it's a pattern worth internalising: a striking physiological number travels much faster than the caveats that should ride with it. The useful response isn't to chase someone else's disputed figure, it's to measure your own honestly. The simplest field method is the Cooper test, run or ride as far as you can in twelve minutes and estimate from the distance:

It's an estimate, and it says so, which already makes it more honest than most of the numbers attached to the pros. Track it over a season and the trend tells you far more than any single headline value.

2026

Evenepoel moved to Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe for 2026, leaving the team he'd been with since his youth. At the 2026 Tour de France he finished second overall behind Tadej Pogačar and won two individual time-trial stages, including one where he beat Pogačar by 28 seconds against the clock. His own summary of the runner-up finish, that he'd "shown he deserves to dream" about future Grand Tours, is a fair read of where he sits: the best stage racer of his generation who isn't named Pogačar or Vingegaard.

What you can actually steal from it

• Pace to a wattage, not to adrenaline. A time trial is won by holding a number you can sustain. Set it with FTP or critical power and hold it.
• Estimate your own VO2max, don't envy a disputed one. The Cooper test gives you an honest, trackable figure. The pros' headline numbers usually aren't verified.
• A trained athlete transfers between sports. Evenepoel's football base and Roglič's ski-jumping base both became cycling engines. Fitness and competitiveness carry over.
• Judge altitude and gadgets on your own response. Even his coach won't apply altitude camps as a blanket rule. Personalise, don't follow dogma.

Evenepoel's real lesson isn't a magic session, it's a mindset: race to a measured number, and be sceptical of the ones you can't measure, including your heroes'.

More in this series: Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, Primož Roglič, Mathieu van der Poel and Demi Vollering.

Sources

Evenepoel's 2026 move to Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe is reported by Cyclingnews; his reported threshold power and altitude approach by BikeRadar; his football background by Cyclist; and his 2020 crash comeback by Cyclingnews. His 2026 Tour de France second place and time-trial stage wins are reported by Cyclingnews and his own comments by Cyclingnews. His Olympic double gold is recorded by Olympics.com. No verified lab VO2max figure for Evenepoel exists in the public record, so none is stated here as fact.

Cover photo by Kakoula10, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.