How do you make the best even better? That’s the conundrum Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe face as they prepare to welcome Remco Evenepoel for next season. And they’re confident they’ll succeed.
On Wednesday, the Belgian dominated the time trial at the European Road Championships, adding a fourth major title to the national, world and Olympic honours he already owns. If the golden helmet and rainbow jersey aren’t telling enough of the 25-year-old’s stronghold in the discipline, then his one-minute winning margins are clear as day.
“Obviously he’s not joined the team yet, but you get ideas of why he’s coming, and he’s coming to challenge himself, and us by association,” Jonny Wale, the team’s technical performance manager, told Cycling Weekly.
“He wants to improve, he doesn’t want to stay where he is. He’s going to buy in, hopefully, to our philosophy of continual development, because that’s what he sees in his future. He’s an aspirational guy, and he knows that he’s not at the level he wants to be now, but hopefully, with our processes, we can bring him up.”
At the head of Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe’s engineering team is Dan Bigham, an aerodynamics expert and Olympic silver medallist. Both Bigham and Wale previously worked together at Ineos Grenadiers, where they helped lead Filippo Ganna‘s bid to shelf the UCI Hour Record.
“I think it’s scary,” said Bigham, “to bring in the Olympic champion, a three-time world champion… where do you go from there? But it comes back to trusting everything about the process.
“Just because he’s achieved performance doesn’t mean everything’s perfect, and I think you have to accept that. That has to be your base premise: he is flawed in how he’s done things – everybody is, we’re definitely not near perfection yet. Therefore there is more performance to be found.
“We haven’t mastered it yet, but there’s plenty of work to be done, and I think we will improve him. I hope we’ll improve him. It’s a scary thing, for sure, but I think we can’t be afraid of changing some aspects of what he does, or how he does things, because as long as you trust everything about your models, your process, then it’s completely justified. Hopefully we make him even more outrageous than he already is.”
It’s the same approach that Bigham and Wale, now heading into their second season with Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe, apply to all the riders they test.
“You don’t treat Remco any differently than you treat anybody else,” said Wale. “Maybe he’s going to probably get more financial resources put into his project, which is deserved, but how we work and how we want to work going forwards is the same from the U19s all the way up to your Remcos. We’re a team. What we do isn’t just for one guy.”
“We want to win with everybody,” Bigham stressed. “We want do podium lockouts, stack the top 10s, just be dominant.” Evenepoel is one piece, albeit a big one, of that puzzle.
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