All images in this article are by the hugely talented Zac WIlliams, conact him here: https://www.instagram.com/z_w_photography/?hl=en

Four consecutive world time trial titles. Montréal was the latest — Remco Evenepoel finishing the better part of a minute clear of Filippo Ganna, a man who stands 1.93m, weighs 82kg, and holds the Hour Record. On paper, that shouldn’t happen. Time trialling has always rewarded raw horsepower and big frames — Cancellara, Martin, Ganna himself. Evenepoel is 1.71m and around 64kg. He’s not supposed to win this discipline four years running. He just keeps doing it anyway.

All images in this article are by the hugely talented Zac WIlliams, contact him here: https://www.instagram.com/z_w_photography/?hl=en

So what’s actually going on here? Let’s have a dig.

Numbers Alone Do Not Explain It

Evenepoel revealed his own FTP this year, on camera, during an altitude block on Mount Teide with coach Dan Lorang: 425 watts. At roughly 64-65kg, that’s about 6.5-6.6 W/kg — elite even by Grand Tour GC standards, let alone for a specialist discipline. His publicly reported VO2 max sits around 89 ml/kg/min, in the same territory as Pogačar and Vingegaard.

Ganna’s numbers are bigger in absolute terms — estimates put his FTP north of 470 watts — but at 82kg that’s closer to 5.7-5.8 W/kg. Ganna’s engine is built for a different kind of effort entirely: he’s a multiple individual pursuit world champion and Hour Record holder (56.792km), a discipline that rewards sustained, enormous absolute power over four flat, controlled minutes on a velodrome. Yet he was still the best TT guy around – til Remco turned up!

On watts-per-kilo alone, Evenepoel’s got an advantage but it’s not all that is going on here.

The Aerodynamics

Evenepoel’s physiotherapist Thijs Hertsens, speaking in the L’Équipe documentary “Le Chrono Maître,” described the ingredients that malke up Remco’s physique: short thighs, compact torso, and arms and a core that fold into an aggressive tuck without collapsing his power output.

Specialized’s Retül team has worked with him since he was a junior. Last autumn alone he spent fifteen hours across two days in Specialized’s wind tunnel in Morgan Hill, arriving at 7am and not leaving until evening, squeezing in a track session to test the position before flying home. Specialized’s Leo Menville said that “I don’t think any rider has been here as often as he has.”

Castelli’s head man Koen Pelgrim noted that there ain’t a lot to improve with Evenepoel: “Remco has a great position on the bike… rather than looking to make big changes, we are trying to fine-tune the setup that we have.” Pelgrim stated that he poses “a unique challenge because his position is so compact and aerodynamic that most of the solutions that work for other riders don’t give the same result with Remco.”

The detail is in the devil – or something like that!

Evenepoel also deliberately matched his road-bike and TT-bike hip angles and pedal stroke, specifically to avoid the power loss most riders eat when they fold into an aero tuck. Add shorter cranks, raised extensions, dedicated strength and mobility work just to hold the position for close to an hour, and — genuinely — “belly breathing” drills to keep his lung capacity functional while folded into a shape most riders can’t sustain for five minutes.

This is something that I have banged on about for years if not decades: for almost all amateurs and some pros who do not do TTs often, swapping onto a TT machine and having to try to adapt to a position that is frankly just weird – elevated elbow pads and arms stretched out like a mantis, improperly balanced and with you neck bent out like a turkey – a TT bike is a disadvantage rather than an advantage.

I won several TTs in my racing career and I was always on a road bike, and in some cases I was the only on on a regular bike. I won the Singapore National TT Champs on a Fuji – the only modification being that i attached the TT extensions – minus the stack pad (I attached the bars under the regular handlebars, allowing me to get stretched out and keep low. I could see that the set up on the TT bike cockpits actually put the other guys’ upper bodies higher than my position put me. Aerodynamics, bloody-mindedness and my power carried me over the line when I raced TTs.

75-80% of a time trial’s total resistance is the rider, not the bike. Evenepoel isn’t winning this on a faster machine. He’s winning it by being a smaller target moving through the air more efficiently than riders with considerably bigger engines.

The Training & A Footballer’s DNA

Evenepoel didn’t come up through junior cycling in the traditional sense — he was a footballer until 17, switched sports, and within his first year won Belgian, European and World junior titles. That’s not a normal development curve. With that, he seems to have a different attitude to most racers. He’s more Badger than Lace Curtains for sure!

Lorang’s sessions on Teide show the method behind the current form: structured threshold blocks — 15 minutes, then paired 12s, paired 10s, an 8 — with blood lactate checked from the ear after each rep. “At 420 watts we’re just below your FTP, at 425 we are somewhere there,” Lorang notes mid-session, reading lactate around 3.5-3.6mmol. Controlled, methodical, unglamorous. This is the unsexy part of the aero-bullet story — hours of interval work that never makes the highlight reel.

The Mentality Monster

Here’s what separates a time trial from every other discipline in the sport: there’s nowhere to hide, no domestique to shelter behind, no rival’s move to react to, no tactical excuse if it goes wrong. It’s just you, a pacing plan, and roughly forty minutes to an hour of sustained pain with nobody to blame but yourself if you misjudge it. That’s a different psychological problem than surviving a mountain stage or reading a bunch sprint — and it’s one Evenepoel is very well suited to.

Twenty-six of his 68 career wins have come in time trials. He’s currently the first rider in the sport’s history to hold four major TT titles simultaneously — Worlds, Olympic, European, and national — at once. That’s not just talent, it’s a rider who’s tailored his training to achieved TT perfection.

Evenepoel himself is explicit about where the confidence comes from, and it’s not arrogance — it’s a compounding effect: “I draw most of my confidence from my preparation. If everything goes well there, my motivation is higher. And if things have gone well at a previous event, that gives me an extra five per cent.” Three consecutive world titles going into Montréal meant he arrived already carrying psychological momentum.

He also describes the format itself as something he genuinely seeks out, rather than merely tolerates: “An hour of just you and no one else — that’s the special appeal of time trials for me. Because apart from perhaps bad luck with mechanical problems, everything is in your own hands.” That’s a rare thing to hear from a professional athlete — treating the loneliest, most self-reliant discipline in the sport as the appealing part rather than the burden.

Personally I know what he is talking about – riding hard, at and above my limits sometimes – that’s where I am most free, most at ease psychologically and emotionally. The noise of the world stops, and it’s just you, the bike, the beauty and the pain.

There’s no doubt you have to be slightly mental to get everything out of your body and then some – this is where the head comes in, and the heart, the anger, the desire, whatever it is. In a way this kind of individual effort is cycling at its most expressive. We see evidence of something burning inside Evenepoel when he addresses the reporters at the end of some stages and remonstrates with breakaway companions.

He is a very well-balanced athlete – he has a chip on each shoulder. You need something like this to want to go hurt yourself – and others – in these events.

His sports director Klaas Lodewyck described the team’s entire pre-race approach in Montréal in terms that reveal exactly why this matters tactically: “We’re not really looking at the opposition, sorry. I don’t want that to sound arrogant, but time trialling is a discipline where you focus entirely on yourself. You recon the course, make a pacing plan and execute it. That’s it. If somebody turns out to be better during the time trial, you don’t suddenly change that plan.”

That’s the real edge, and it’s not physiological. A time trial punishes hesitation and second-guessing harder than almost any other format in cycling — go out too hard chasing a rival’s split time and you blow up with no teammate to pace you back; go out too conservatively second-guessing your own legs and you never get the time back. Evenepoel’s camp has stripped that entire failure mode out of the equation by refusing to engage with it at all. No splits chased, no rivals watched, no plan changed mid-effort. Just fully committed execution of a plan.

Ganna will out-power Evenepoel on a raw wattage readout most days. He probably always will — that’s what an 82kg pursuit specialist is built for. But time trialling was never really a pure power contest, whatever the discipline’s reputation suggests. It’s a drag-coefficient problem wearing a power meter, and Evenepoel has spent a decade — wind tunnel session by wind tunnel session, since he was a junior — solving that problem better than anyone else currently racing.

Four world titles in and it seems to be going quite well…