"It was extreme this time" - Remco Evenepoel and his wife Oumi dismiss rumours of cheating and splitting up

Unusual news roamed around social media this week that Remco Evenepoel and his wife Ouimaima Rayane had split after allegedly cheating, after 'Oumi' deleted all the posts from her Instagram. This turns out not to be the case and the Olympic Champion addressed this topic in a recent interview.

“Gossip and rumours are not news to us, even though it was extreme this time. That's how it has always been. We just try to remain there as a team," Evenepoel told Het Laatste Nieuws. "Oumi and I discuss everything openly and without any hesitation, we don't keep anything from each other. We don't stoop to that level and even though it sometimes scares us, we mainly laugh about it.”

“When I fell in April (Evenepoel fractured a shoulder blade and collarbone at Itzulia Basque Country, ed.), there was doubt. Would I make it to the Tour? I only had two months, and I can count myself lucky to have a mature, strong woman like Oumi standing next to me at such a moment. Oumi supports me, she helps me, she puts me first. Her own schoolwork comes second.”

The couple got married in 2022 and the Belgian rider has often complemented the role of their relationship in his maturing as a rider as well as the capacity to handle the extreme media pressure that came alongside being a massive talent since a very young age in a country that is crazy for cycling. He has since fulfilled many of the expectations that had been put on him, and he describes how this year specially in his recovery his partner was an instrumental part of it.

“During one of my first roller training sessions, in the run-up to the Tour, I had to do a test with ice cubes to keep my body temperature under control. For an hour and a half, Oumi literally walked from the kitchen to the rollers, to get portions of ice every time. And when I finally won the time trial in the Tour, I knew: I owe that to everything that came before. Also to those ice cubes," he jokes.

Recently Evenepoel got in a bad crash again, suffering several fractures of which he is since recovering. He hopes to be back on the bike on the 9th of January when he will have an important medical check up, but at home he tries to be more helpful. “Now that I’m injured, I’m trying to do it the other way around. Cook dinner. Or make sure she can start studying right after breakfast.”

“Nobody knew better than the two of us what had preceded that double gold. The many hours away from each other. The Tour. People always focus on the finish photo, but they forget what came before," Evenepoel says, taking the opportunity to go deep on how important this is in his life. "They don’t see the bad days, not the moments of rehabilitation. Only partners see those. I go to sleep with Oumi, I get up with her, it’s she who motivates me in the morning to go for it again. And it’s also she who is there for me when things aren’t going well.”

After his success at the Tour and Olympic Games, they went to Greece for a few days, revealed to us by Patrick Lefevere himself. "We only took four days off after the Games, because interviews were scheduled, but in retrospect I think: I should have done that differently. We should have taken ten days there for the two of us," he admits. "I'm going to remember that for the future. That it's okay to think about ourselves and say no sometimes. That's a responsibility I want to take, in exchange for all the times I leave her alone. I'm going to do that differently from 2025. Better."

Oumi herself said to the news outlet that the rumours on the two are a constant: “We sometimes hear the craziest things about ourselves. That we are pregnant. Or that we are separated. Or move to another country. But we know better".