OVERIJSE: Remco Evenepoel said even he was surprised as he won the Brabantse Pijl one-day race on Friday in Belgium on his comeback, four months after a serious training accident.

Evenepoel outsprinted fellow Belgian Wout Van Aert after the pair broke clear.

“I surprised myself. I was very fresh,” said Evenepoel. “I’m especially pleased with my sprint. I’ve been working a lot on my explosiveness recently and it’s paid off.

“I really needed this race to find some answers to all the questions I had, and now I feel a big relief. Winning this race, in a sprint against Wout, gives me a lot of confidence for the next competitions. During the race I felt that the legs were pretty good, so I decided to attack and we opened a gap.

“It made us believe in our chances, and we kept going until it was just me and Wout in the closing kilometre. I felt that I was strong in the finale and gave my best there. It was a perfect day for us and it brought me a lot of satisfaction.”

The 25-year-old was greeted by a huge crowd on the final circuit in the Brussels suburbs.

He fired up his fans when he attacked 49 kilometres from the line with Van Aert and Briton Joseph Blackmore.

The two Belgians dropped Blackmore on Herts­traat, one of the race’s cobbled climbs, with 15km to go.

Evenepoel, the double gold medallist in last year’s Paris Olympics, tore shoulder ligaments when he crashed into the open door of a Belgian postal van in December. The injury, he said ahead of Friday’s race, “would have ended my career if I had been a tennis or basketball player”.

He rode on Friday with a bandage on his right shoulder that is still causing him pain.

It was Evenepoel’s first win since he retained his world road time trial title in Zurich, Switzerland in September.

Evenepoel will next race in the Amstel Gold Race, La Fleche Wallonne and Liege-Bastogne-Liege, which he has won twice.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2025