It was described as the ‘bike change of the year’ by Het Laatste Nieuws. And certainly when Remco Evenepoel was riding solo towards a near-certain second Olympic gold medal in the Men’s Road Race, only to puncture with just over three kilometres to go, the possibility of a major last-minute disaster suddenly seemingly loomed higher than the nearby Eiffel Tower.
However, even as Evenepoel put his bike on the side of the road and turned to yell ‘Bike, bike, bike’ for assistance, help was at hand, in the shape of the Belgian team car and notably mechanic Kurt Roose.
Normally part of Evenepoel’s Soudal-QuickStep team, Roose leapt out of the car, rushed over to the rider with a replacement bike and finally provided a sustained push to put him safely back up to speed for Olympic success, with most of his time gap still intact.
Crisis averted – but as the experienced mechanic said later, tension had already been high in the Belgian team car even before the puncture.
The race commissaires had taken their time to let the vehicle follow Evenepoel once he attacked and opened more than a minute’s gap with 15 kilometres to go. And then the events out on the road, close to the Louvre museum only caused that tension to rise even higher.
“The team coach Sven Vanthourenhout was at the wheel and he yelled at me ‘Kurt, bike!’, Roose told Dernière Heure.
“The stress was already notable in the car because the race commissaire had just refused to let us get behind Remco until the gap reached a minute, and she clearly didn’t have the same information as we did.”
“I jumped out of the car to grab Remco’s reserve bike which was the first on the rack and ran up to him with it.”
“He was really stressed out” – Evenepoel later commented that he had just seen a sign saying he only had 25 seconds on closest pursuer Valentin Madouas (France), when in fact the gap was more than a minute – “and he was yelling at me to hurry up,” Roose commented.
“But that was normal, there was a second gold medal in the space of a week in play.”
Roose commented later that he had pushed him as well as possible to get him restarted, while trying to stay calm.
“Panic is always a bad advisor,” he said. “The only thing to do is take action.”
Showing an impressive turn of speed as he pushed Evenepoel back up to the highest pace he could manage, Roose said afterwards with a laugh that “My sprint isn’t bad for a 51-year-old lad, is it?”
“Jogging from time to time is a hobby of mine but I’ve currently got an injured foot and I’ve put on some weight, which I’ll have to try and lose.”
However, injured or not, Roose certainly showed enough speed in the finale of the men’s road race to provide some more than timely assistance to the Belgian team star – and in the process help tip back the balance in Evenepoel’s favour, too, from a possible last-minute defeat to a second landmark victory.
