When Remco Evenepoel confirmed his long-rumoured move to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, it didn’t just signal a new chapter in his already storied career — it marked a definitive shift in the balance of Grand Tour racing for the next few years. With this transfer, the clustering of elite GC talent into a small handful of WorldTour outfits has reached a new height. Cycling, long a sport of improbable upsets and evenly poised battles, suddenly feels like it’s entering a new, more predictable era — one where the arms race is being won by a select few superteams.
The numbers tell the story. Since we entered the 2020s, we have had 17 Grand Tours shared by five teams UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Visma-Lease a Bike, Ineos Grenadiers, Bora-Hansgrohe, and the one outlier Soudal-Quickstep thanks to Evenepoel’s 2022 Vuelta a España win. Pretty much all of the viable Tour de France contenders for the next few years are now concentrated in three of these teams with Ineos and Quickstep unlikely to challenge the UAE-Visma-Bora triumvirate that has now formed.
There of course exceptions like the mercurial 18-year-old talent Paul Seixas who is riding for Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team, Richard Carapaz of EF Education-EasyPost and the improving Oscar Onley who was solid at the Tour riding for Team Picnic PostNL.
But when Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel, Primož Roglič, João Almeida, Florian Lipowitz, Isaac del Toro, Matteo Jorgenson, Juan Ayuso, Simon and Adam Yates are clustered in three teams, it’s hard to see any other squads get a sniff at Grand Tour win or even a week-long stage race.
Evenepoel’s arrival at Red Bull is not an anomaly, it’s a trend that’s quickened in recent years. You only have to look at May's Giro d’Italia, won by Simon Yates, now of Visma, but until this year was riding for a similarly-sized outfit to Quickstep at Jayco Alula.
The GC fight is no longer a battle among individuals, it’s a proxy war between the teams with the most money. Each of these teams has their own ethos, their own scientific approach, their own ecosystem of performance — and each of them is locking down not just riders, but data, tech, marginal gains, altitude blocks, and the best talent on the market, often from smaller teams who don’t have the budgets to win a bidding war.
Remco’s move to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe — which is backed by one of the most recognisable energy drinks on earth — is a power play in every sense. The team was already trending upwards, with a Vuelta win courtesy of Roglič in 2024 to add to their Giro win with Hindley in 2022 and a Tour podium for Lipowitz this year. But with Remco, they gain more than watts: they gain headlines, leverage, and a seat at the power table.
For the fans, though, the optics are perhaps less thrilling. Where once a Grand Tour start list might offer four or five legitimate podium outsiders from across a range of teams, we now see a recurring theme: one superteam versus another, and everyone else playing for a top ten or a breakaway. Lidl-Trek’s signature of Tao Geoghegan Hart was a rare bright spot for the sport’s middle class, but it’s hard to argue that they’ll be threatening yellow anytime soon. The same goes for Carapaz at EF, Onley at Picnic, and Gall at Decathlon.
This is not to mourn the death of racing — far from it. As Pogačar showed with his bold Giro-Tour double attempt, audacity and spirit still matter. As Sepp Kuss proved in 2023, even a domestique can win a Grand Tour — provided he’s riding for a superteam. The question is how sustainable this new equilibrium is. If the peloton becomes more of a two-tier system — GC superteams and everyone else — then what happens to the narrative tension that makes Grand Tours so compelling?
Of course, consolidation is not a new phenomenon in cycling. We’ve seen dominant eras before — La Vie Claire in the 80s, US Postal in the noughties, Team Sky in the 2010s. But rarely have we seen such a rapid concentration of GC firepower across so few entities, in such a commercially supercharged environment. The sport is becoming more professional, more scientific, more expensive — and less accessible to teams without nine-figure budgets and sponsors with global reach.
Evenepoel’s move is, in isolation, good business and good sport. It certainly bolsters Red Bull’s chances of beating Pogačar at the Tour next year, as he will have to look out for three potential threats. But zoom out, and it’s part of a larger pattern: the rise of the superteams, and the quiet decline of the middle class. Cycling may not be broken — but it’s changing fast. The question is, who’s still going to believe in the miracles that make the sport compelling, when all the stars ride for the same three teams?
