Cubism on Two Wheels
The many angles of Remco Evenepoel
by Ishan
I see everything through art, and cycling is no exception. They’re not completely disconnected — the Italian futurists were fond of painting cyclists in their efforts to capture dynamism and motion, and there’s a long history of bicycles depicted in artwork. But that’s not true of Cubism specifically, and yet that artistic movement is the only framework I can use to analyze Evenepoel.
It’s like this: why did Georges Braque paint The Portuguese? One of the most famous Analytical Cubist works, it depicts the fragmented figure of a guitar player on the docks. Braque painted the scene not only as he saw it, but from the sea, the sky, another man’s eyes; from every possible point of view. The Cubists tried to understand not only the subject but also how we view the subject. Each person, each cyclist, is a collection of angles, but can we see them all at once?
Evenepoel is a complicated figure, different every time I look at him, almost impossible for me to comprehend as a whole. I'm trying to see one subject from all angles. Braque uses his paintbrush. I have my words. We fracture the things we want to understand.
Evenepoel is, of course, a cyclist, the easiest angle to paint first. At nineteen, he went straight from a dominant season in Juniors to racing at the WorldTour level. Since then he's won — among other things — the Vuelta a España, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and two World Championships. It's easy to find words for someone who wins like he does. Talent. Prodigy. Born for it.
He wasn’t always a cyclist, though, one of those facts the commentators often bring up when the race is slow and the camera is back on him. Remco Evenepoel used to play junior football.
By most accounts, Evenepoel the footballer was the near-opposite of Evenepoel the cyclist. Rather than a precocious young talent who won nearly everything he touched, those who knew him at his club Anderlecht describe him as mature and hard-working, made captain because of his leadership ability but far from the most skilled player on the team. He was known for his running, going box-to-box as a midfielder during matches, setting VO2 max records in training, and once participating in a half marathon for fun — his aptitude for cycling showing in his endurance even then.
In hindsight, his second career was always the one he was more suited to. Pablo Picasso helped begin the Analytical Cubist movement, but he found greater success with Synthetic Cubism, a later evolution of the style. Evenepoel, now a Grand Tour and Monument winner, is likely more successful than he’d ever have become as a footballer. Neither would be where they are without the influence of an earlier period.
However similar the two may be, though, I see far more similarities between Evenepoel and the Cubist paintings themselves. Interpreting art, even when it seems difficult, is usually relatively simple. A painting doesn’t change no matter how many centuries pass, and even today I can look at Braque’s paintings and find exactly what he intended me to see. Understanding it takes longer, but there’s a framework for artistic analysis that more or less allows every work to be deconstructed into its meaning.
No such method exists for people, let alone public figures, and trying to make sense of Evenepoel’s personality is less straightforward. He can be standoffish, combative, ready to argue his side of any circumstance — the Belgian team debacle at the 2021 World Championships comes to mind. Moments like that remind me of being a teenager, in the wrong and acting like the world was working against me. I’d made up my mind, decided Evenepoel was immature. Then I was surprised again when he shut down both his father and Patrick Lefevre as they argued over his transfer, giving only blank responses when he was asked.
It shouldn’t have been unexpected, though. He’s been in the public eye for long enough that he doesn’t celebrate with Michael Jackson’s dance moves anymore, probably knows the right things to say in most situations even if he doesn’t always say them. I watched replays of his older races, the 2020 Tour de Pologne, the 2019 Euros, even the 2023 Tour de Suisse. Races where he won and paid tribute to the tragedies of the peloton, interviews where he was eloquent even as he cried. Not immature, just emotional — furious when he loses and in tears when he wins.
Looking at photos from those races, I can’t help but think that every artistic movement has its most famous pieces, the ones that define it. Analytical Cubism has The Portuguese or Girl with a Mandolin. To me, these are the defining images of Remco Evenepoel: crossing the line after riding a long way alone, sometimes screaming with his hands raised, sometimes silent with his head down.
But a movement’s signature piece can change over time, and so can the style itself. As Cubism evolved, artists began to include elements of collage in their artwork, a form known as papier collé. Braque began this tradition by drawing on imitation wood-grain paper. Picasso went further, incorporating pages from the French newspaper Le Journal in order to introduce an element of everyday life into his works.
To paint this view of reality without the press, then, would be to leave it incomplete. There is no way to look at Remco Evenepoel without seeing the media that surrounds him.
This is especially true of Belgium, where, it seemed, one cyclist of the century was not enough; when Evenepoel started his cycling career, headlines quickly proclaimed him to be the next Merckx . Not without reason — there were 9 minutes and 44 seconds between him and second place in the 2018 European Championships junior road race — but 40 years of difference between him and Merckx did little to change the narrative, even when Evenepoel himself requested for the comparisons to stop. At other times, the media is openly critical of him, doubting his climbing or bike handling when he doesn’t come up with results.
It's clear that he is well aware of his fluctuating media portrayal and public opinion. At the Vuelta this year, he told the cameras that "tomorrow everybody will criticize me for saying this" before he condemned the race organization. But for all that he seems to know how he’s perceived, Evenepoel doesn’t mince words, often expressing himself quite harshly in post race interviews. Sometimes, when claiming that he “could have won” if circumstances were different, he even comes off as a sore loser. But then again, during longer sit-down interviews, I find him to be well-spoken and thoughtful, giving credit where it’s due.
And yet despite so many things which seem to contradict one another, I never get the impression that Evenepoel is anything less than honest. He can be both thoughtful and abrasive, emotional and surprisingly mature, successful and still improving, but those are just different angles of the same subject. Analytical Cubist works can always be reconstructed into a whole image, no matter how disparate the fragments may seem.
The Portuguese, in the end, is a portrait of a man.