It must be tough sometimes being Remco Evenepoel. The latest in the long line of Belgian riders labelled ‘the next Eddy Merckx’, the Quick Step-Alpha Vinyl rider – who has just turned 22 lest we forget – has had the spotlight relentlessly shone on him since he burst onto the scene as an all-conquering junior.
His otherworldly talent has never been in question (as we can see at this week’s Tirreno-Adriatico, where he looks best poised to challenge Tadej Pogačar for the win), though he’s also had to constantly fend off accusations that he’s cycling’s ‘enfant terrible’, a disruptive presence in both his Quick Step team and the Belgian national squad.
This morning’s news – that Evenepoel was fined and banned from driving for three weeks after he was caught speeding at 125km/h (almost 80mph) in a 70km/h zone – certainly won’t dissuade anyone sceptical of the young Belgian sensation’s attitude.
However, Remco certainly isn’t the first high-profile pro cyclist to be caught speeding behind the wheel.
In 2008 Tom Boonen – the original celebrity poster boy of Belgian cycling – lost his driving license for 14 days after his was similarly caught driving at 120km/h in a 70km/h zone.
The speeding offence for Boonen – arguably Belgium’s biggest sporting star at that time – came either side of two positive out-of-competition tests for cocaine in 2008 and 2009 (and another earlier cocaine positive in 2007).
An altogether different character, 2010 Tour de France winner Andy Schleck, successfully appealed a one-month driving ban in 2017 after he was clocked driving at 52mph in a 30mph zone in his native Luxembourg.
Later that year another Tour winner who arguably failed to fulfil his early promise, Jan Ullrich, was handed a £7,700 fine and a suspended 21 month prison sentence after he crashed into two cars in the village of Happerswil in Switzerland.
The German, who has had a number of well-publicised problems with drugs and alcohol, was found to be ‘heavily drunk and medicated’ at the time of the crash. Luckily there were no injuries, despite Ullrich driving at over 130kmph in an 80kmph area before the incident.
Ullrich’s personal demons were certainly not an anomalous feature within the peloton of the 1990s, with some of the sport’s most tragic stars committing driving offences as they struggled with addiction, depression and the after-effects of the sport’s toxic atmosphere in those years.
The mercurial and troubled Belgian star Frank Vandenbroucke, the subject of Andy McGrath’s new book God is Dead, reviewed by road.cc today, was twice stopped by police in 2002 while under the influence of alcohol behind the wheel.
In November 2000, the Giro and Tour winner Marco Pantani damaged eight cars while speeding the wrong way up a street in Cesena. The Italian climber, who by that point had already succumbed to cocaine addiction, despite winning the Ventoux stage of the Tour four months before, was involved in three separate incidents involving cars that day.