Culture
Remco Evenepoel: The Tour de France contender who might have played for Belgium at Euro 2024
Two storylines have been dominating Belgium’s back pages.
First, the make-up of Domenico Tedesco’s team for these European Championships — and in particular, a problem position at left-back, where Rennes centre-back Arthur Theate is expected to fill in.
Second? The physical condition of cyclist Remco Evenepoel, one of the three favourites to win the Tour de France, which begins on June 29. A victory for him there would be Belgium’s first in the race for 48 years.
The connection? In another world, Evenepoel as the Belgian left-back at Euro 2024 was a very real possibility.
The 24-year-old played for the academies of both Anderlecht and PSV Eindhoven, captaining Belgium up until under-16 level, and played with two of Belgium’s current squad: forwards Jeremy Doku and Lois Openda.
Other past team-mates included Arsenal pair Jakub Kiwior and Albert Sambi Lokonga, while he shared a private training coach with Youri Tielemans and Michy Batshuayi, who were older but from the same area of Brussels.
“He was at the highest level,” Bob Browaeys, Evenepoel’s coach with Belgium Under-16s, tells The Athletic. “I never had a player with such a high-performance mindset. That was unbelievable.”
This is the story of how football helped create one of the world’s biggest cycling stars.
(Stuart Franklin/Getty Images,)
Eden Hazard’s mouth is open and the mirrored sunglasses cannot hide the pain etched on his face.
The ex-Chelsea and Belgium superstar, famously averse to physical conditioning during his playing career, is cycling up the lunar slopes of Mont Ventoux, one of the sport’s most iconic climbs.
Clad in the kit of minor Belgian cycling team Intermarche-Wanty — the equivalent of turning up to five-a-side in a Leyton Orient shirt — his Instagram post is flooded with impressed messages. Thibaut Courtois, the Tour de France, and Evenepoel himself all have their say. “Fenomeno,” says Evenepoel.
Hazard’s post shows that, in Belgium, there are two sports of importance — cycling and football — and Evenepoel has lived them both. And despite Belgium’s golden football generation, the cyclists are invariably more beloved.
Eddy Merckx, widely considered the greatest cyclist of all time and another to comment on Hazard’s post, is Belgium’s greatest sporting son. In modernity, Evenepoel has won back-to-back Sportsman of the Year awards, despite the achievements and popularity of Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku. Wout van Aert, another cyclist, won the previous two.
Evenepoel with cycling legend Eddy Merckx at an Anderlecht game in 2022 (Virginie Lefour/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images)
Evenepoel’s father Patrick was a cyclist; not a major talent but still good enough to win the 1993 Fleche Wallone, a high-profile race in Belgium, before being forced into retirement with a heart condition. A great-grandfather, Frans Van Eeckhout, was also a professional. Remco, born in 2000, picked up their genes.
“At five years old, he accompanied me to the Gordel (a cycling tour around Brussels),” said Evenepoel’s grandfather Eduard in 2022. “He insisted on riding the 50 kilometers. He barely stopped twice. We had only removed the two stabilisers from his bike for a month.”
But Evenepoel’s first love was football, where he was a left-footed midfielder who amazed coaches with his ability to run. Diminutive and with a mop of shaggy hair, his first coaches nicknamed him “Smurf”.
“His gloves were bigger than his face,” former Anderlecht youth coach Marc Van Ransbeeck told Belgian newspaper DH. “He wanted to become a goalkeeper when he first joined and dreamed of being Daniel Zitka, the starter at that time.
“But he already ran very well and had incredible endurance — I always compared it to a moped.”
Evenepoel was quickly moved outfield, where he formed a midfield partnership with Sambi Lokonga, now at Arsenal. The cyclist is an Arsenal fan and was at the Emirates Stadium for their 5-0 win over Chelsea on April 23.
“Lokonga is actually in the team I dreamed of being in, so he’s actually made my dream come true,” Evenepoel said two years ago.
Lokonga himself is similarly impressed at his former team-mate’s exploits. Evenepoel won the Vuelta a Espana in 2022, one of cycling’s three Grand Tours, and would likely have won the Giro d’Italia the following year, which he was leading, if not for a Covid-19 diagnosis.
“He was one year below me but sometimes the 1999 and 2000 players trained together, and so he trained with me,” Lokonga tells The Athletic “It’s crazy what he’s done. I know that when he was young, when we had to run up and down, he was already one of the best so that maybe helped with the distances you ride when you are a cyclist.”
When Evenepoel was in the under-10s, his father showed Anderlecht coaches a document. It was his son’s stress test results. The doctor had left a comment in the margins: “Never seen that in my career”. His coaches’ response was that Evenepoel was displaying triathlete numbers — and they were not far wrong.
From an early age, Evenepoel was aware of some of the technical limitations in his game. He worked hard to improve his right foot, doing post-training ‘extras’ before he reached double-digits.
Nevertheless, his best attributes were always those where he didn’t need the ball at his feet: fitness and mentality.
“My style of play was a bit similar to how I ride a bike,” he has described. “I had a big engine and tried to cover every blade of grass.”
From 11 until 14, Evenepoel moved to the Netherlands to play in the academy of Dutch side PSV Eindhoven. His competitiveness was evident, frequently entering pitched table tennis battles with the father of his host family. However, in 2014, he moved back to Anderlecht for family reasons: his mother was ill in Brussels.
Ter bewijs dat ze echt samen gespeeld hebben: Hier scoort Cody Gakpo na een (mislukte) voorzet van Remco Evenepoel. https://t.co/kb4hKRIr9y pic.twitter.com/yipf63elWS
— Hidde Spaan (@HiddeSpaan) September 12, 2022
The same year, Evenepoel was called up to the Belgium Under-15s, which was the first time that Belgium Under-16 head coach Browaeys saw him play. The next year, when Evenepoel graduated, Brouwaeys kept him as captain.
“I spoke to him often in that role,” Browaeys tells The Athletic. “And I was always puzzled. He was so professional at such a young age; just 15, talking about his preparations for games, for his careers. He was special. Uncommon.”
“In the older age groups, you’re the right hand of the coach but that’s not always easy with the youth teams because they’re so young,” agrees Anderlecht coach Stephane Stassin, speaking to Cycling Weekly. “Remco, however, was the exception: he was effectively the right hand of the coach and he talked to his team-mates. When I asked him to do something, sometimes he would say that he had already talked with his team-mates and arranged what was needed.”
Though Browaeys kept Evenepoel as captain, he did make one major change: with more technical players in the midfield, he moved him to left-back, where his charge could bomb metronomically up and down the wing.
At Anderlecht, coaches had been wary of controlling his running ability, describing him as inventing a new position: a player who attacked as a No 10 and defended in front of the back four. He would run 12km each game as a young teenager — a huge amount at that age. His biggest rival in endurance tests was defender Hannes Delcroix, one year older, now at Burnley.
“You would see Remco, on the beep tests, continuing to run while everybody else had stopped,” says Stassin. “He always wanted to know before how well Delcroix had done. They had a little competition — and we considered Delcroix a physical machine. That defines Remco. He would never let go if he was not the best.”
Evenepoel in the leader’s pink jersey at the 2023 Giro D’Italia (Tim de Waele/Getty Images)
In his later years at Anderlecht’s academy, coaches say he even beat the conditioning results of first-team defensive midfielder Lucas Biglia, a starter for Argentina in the 2014 World Cup final after moving to Lazio.
One real-life story — improbable enough to sound like legend — came during the Brussels half-marathon when Evenepoel was just 16.
“I started the race a bit earlier because I was running with a disability association,” says Stassin. “At one moment, I heard a whole group of really fast runners come by, some Kenyans, and then there was one guy who said ‘Hey coach, how are you doing?’.
“He (Evenepoel) was running like crazy again — the morning after playing a game on the Saturday. He finished eighth, I think, in 87 minutes.”
Everybody has a similar story. Sebastiaan Bornauw is a Belgium international centre-back, now at Wolfsburg, who played with Evenepoel at Anderlecht.
“It was a big coincidence that we were once both staying in the same hotel in Lanzarote,” he told Cycling Weekly. “It was a sports hotel with all the facilities, so we were playing some football and doing some pre-season together.
“One day, he asked me to join him cycling. I love cycling — I’m typically Belgian in that I love the classics in Flanders. He asked me to go on a bike tour with him and I said yes. I thought it would be 50km.
“He said, ‘Ah, yeah, the tour is between 160 and 180km’. I said, ‘Remco, good luck!’. I didn’t join him.”
Cycling is a dangerous sport. Last year, Swiss climber Gino Mader died during a descent in the Tour de Suisse; there have been dozens of other tragedies in recent decades.
In August 2020, Evenepoel endured his own terrifying crash during an Italian race: Il Lombardia. He ran wide at a narrow turn over a bridge and his handlebars caught the stonework, sending the rider, just two years into his professional career, over the edge and into a ravine.
Evenepoel fractured his pelvis and punctured his lung — but if branches had not cushioned his fall or a small ledge had not stopped him from falling further into the ravine, the consequences could have been far worse. Nevertheless, the recovery was long and arduous, with Evenepoel open about the psychological distress it caused him. However, he had come through dark times before.
Paying tribute to the late Gino Mader during the 2023 Tour de Suisse (Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)
Bornauw — alongside other former team-mates such as Alexis Saelemaekers, Lokonga, Openda, and Doku — all became professional footballers. Evenepoel did not.
“I was captain of the national team, then they put me on the bench and I started to ask myself questions: ‘Is it worth continuing?’” he told The Lanterne Rouge cycling podcast last year. “Then, I wasn’t even on the bench anymore. I just wasn’t in the top 15 players. Then I really started to hate the sport.”
Browaeys, his national manager at the time, thinks that as coaches, Belgium’s management team could have collectively improved other parts of his game.
“His football was based on his physical skill and mentality — but we missed the tactical progression a little,” he remembers. “He maybe played too much with his heart and not enough with his brain‚ but that’s logical when you’re 15 years old. From March 2016, Anderlecht began to leave him on the bench and it was very difficult for me to select him after that — especially difficult because he was my captain.
“He was often poorly placed on the pitch,” Koen Boghe, a coach at KV Mechelen, where Evenepoel played for six months after his eventual release from Anderlecht, told DH Sports. “Especially when losing the ball. We played him as a left-back and he had difficulty correcting himself tactically.
“I had the impression that he was always going full throttle, like on his bike, except that sometimes, you have to hold back from riding so as not to get caught in the back. I wonder if he could have made up for his shortcomings.”
Another view was that while Evenepoel’s fitness was good, he lacked short-distance explosiveness. When his boyhood club released him in January 2017, Evenepoel was distraught. He has never gone into detail about his final months at Anderlecht but spoke of getting “a disgust of football simply because of everything that happens inside the clubs”.
One former team-mate, Vince Colpaert, told the Belgian website VP that “Mechelen wanted him but Anderlecht was childish… they did not want to release him and he was only allowed to play practice matches, while we had competitions every weekend. Then he played twice in six months.”
“I was close to depression,” Evenepoel has said. “I’m a very sociable person, but I didn’t talk to anyone anymore.”
Evenepoel is one of the biggest stars in professional cycling and is hugely popular in Belgium (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
Close to the end of his time at Mechelen, Evenepoel sat in the woods on his bike. He had always used mountain biking as a form of off-season training — but the trails had brought him to a crossroads. He was even considering stopping elite sport himself and becoming a physio.
“I said to myself: ‘Either you do your training and you go for it, or you take your bike, go back home, and change sports, your whole life’,” he told the Lanterne Rouge podcast. “This was at 17. I was a very good student but that year, I was just trash at school. It was an up-and-down year. I just lost my mind.”
That day, he made the decision to quit football and, based on his raw biometric data, pursue cycling.
“He still had a nice profile for a wing-back,” remembers Browaeys. “I was surprised when I heard he had become a cyclist because honestly, for me, it was still possible to become a professional player.”
But stubbornness has always been part of Evenepoel’s make-up and on this day, he was resolved. As he tells it, he snuck into the family garage and took his father’s road bicycle, which was far too large for him.
“My parents didn’t know I was changing sports. Only my personal physical coach,” Evenepoel remembers.
From his home, he rode up the famed Mur de Grammont (more widely known in Flemish as the Muur van Geraardsbergen), completing the 117km in three and a half hours — and at a startling average speed of 34kph. It was his first time using a road bike outside.
As soon as his father saw the data, Evenepoel no longer needed to keep his riding secret. He immediately competed in his first races as an unaffiliated rider in a black jersey — coming 10th in a local time-trial with an ordinary bike with road handlebars, 50 seconds off the winner.
Evenepoel is the current time trial world champion (Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)
In cycling-mad Belgium, even local races are closely watched by teams — and Evenepoel was immediately picked up by a junior club. His rise to the top of his new sport is another story entirely, but here are some highlights.
He won 34 of his first 44 races. At the 2018 European Junior Road Cycling Championships, just 14 months into his new career, he won both the road race and time trial — finishing nine minutes ahead of the second-place finisher in the former. Both titles in the Junior World Championships followed later that year.
The crash at Il Lombardia in 2020 set him back but Evenepoel is now entrenched as a Grand Tour winner and one of the world’s best all-round riders, a half-step back from the current big two: Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar and Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard.
What role did his football career play? Relatively few players reach such a high level of football before successfully switching sports, owing to football’s onus for early specialisation. British sprinter Adam Gemili is a rare counterpart. Evenepoel’s raw fitness, in a sense, has always been there but football fostered his competitiveness — and though some coaches deemed him tactically naive, Evenepoel still thinks it provided his strategic outlook.
“I think football maybe helped me with the mind games during the race,” he told reporters in April. “In football, you have to try to crack your opponents mentally by putting your foot a bit harder on their toe than you should do.
“Stuff like that helps me, in a race, to go over the limit a bit and try to have different tactics than other teams would. Maybe physically, football didn’t help me a lot to come into cycling but more the mental games and the other games going in the bunch during the race. Nothing negative but sometimes, when you are suffering, you have to make it look like you are not suffering. Stuff like that is what I learned more from football.”
His tactics were good enough to win the complex 21-stage Vuelta a Espana in 2022, while victory in the following year’s Giro was cruelly prevented by Covid-19. The peloton is agreed that Evenepoel is a rider with the potential to win all three Grand Tours over the course of his career.
The Tour de France is next — and though he sustained a nasty crash in the Tour of the Basque Country two months ago, fracturing his collarbone, he recovered enough to win the time trial at the Criterium du Dauphine in June, the Tour’s main warm-up race.
Back in lockdown, Evenepoel returned to Anderlecht to train. When crowds returned, a parade finally gave him the opportunity to wear purple in front of a capacity Lotto Park. But an interview during training allowed him to explain how he really felt.
“I spent 11 years here,” he told reporters. “To be honest, the last few years were the toughest. They broke me a bit mentally.
“But when I look back on it now, it has made me stronger as a person and in life. Thanks for trying to break me. Frankly, I am more proud to wear (my cycling) jersey. And now I have more fun.”
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
When last we saw a Major League Baseball game, the Los Angeles Dodgers were celebrating a World Series title at Yankee Stadium. If you’re a trivia lover like me, you might have noticed a historical oddity: The Dodgers have now clinched a championship at three different versions of Yankee Stadium — the original (in 1955), the renovated original (in 1981) and the current one (in 2024).
Yet how many times have the Dodgers clinched on their home field? Just once, in 1963 — also against the Yankees, naturally.
Those kinds of connections are everywhere in this wonderfully zany sport. To score well on our annual holiday Trivia Extravaganza, it’s best to keep them in mind. Good luck with the nifty fifty questions for 2024, my baseball friends. You may need it.
(For the best results on mobile, you may want to take the quiz directly at this link.)
(Top illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Luke Hales, Nick Cammett, Mark Cunningham / Getty Images)
Sports stars, celebrities, and even cryptocurrency all have rookie cards… but does Santa Claus? It’s a question you may ask yourself after consuming a little too much nutmeg. And since the season of giving is officially here, I want to spread some holiday cheer by highlighting Christmas-themed trading cards, which is a bigger niche than you may realize.
So let’s dive into a fun corner of the trading card world, one dominated by the GOAT of gift giving himself: Old St. Nick.
A brief history of Santa Claus trading cards
An 1891 Woolson Spice card. (Photo: eBay)
There isn’t a concrete origin story of Santa Claus trading cards, but some of the first examples in the United States date back to the late 1800s. Ohio-based company Woolson Spice created several artistic Christmas trading cards featuring Santa sitting around the tree with children or on his sleigh. Woolson Spice used the back of the cards to advertise its products, such as Lion Coffee.
There technically isn’t a card from the 19th century that’s coined as Santa’s “true” rookie card among the collecting community, but one of his most known from the time can be found in the 1890 Duke Holidays set. The popular tobacco company produced a 50-card set featuring three Christmas cards, but only the U.S. variation included Santa Claus. According to Professional Sports Authenticators’ (PSA) graded population report, the company has authenticated less than 15 copies. An example of the card is even in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.
1890 Duke Holidays Christmas, U.S. card. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)
It’s fascinating to see Santa Claus’ evolution from how he was depicted back then compared to today. Many early picture cards showed a thinner-looking version, sometimes dressed in a green or brown suit. It was Coca-Cola’s advertisements starting in the early 1930s that cemented the image of Santa Claus that we have today (although it was political cartoonist Thomas Nast who originated it in the 1860s). And yes, there are trading cards featuring those old Coke ads that were made in the 1990s.
In the late 1980s, the sports card industry exploded in popularity and began producing more and more sets. One of the first Santa Claus cards that caught the attention of modern collectors is the iconic 1989 Pro Set Football card. The promotional card was given to card shop owners and dealers during the holidays and could not be pulled out of packs, which heightened demand for it.
1989 Pro Set promo card. (Photo: eBay)
The front of the card lists Santa Claus as a “player-coach” and depicts him wearing a baseball cap bearing his own name and a red satin jacket emblazoned with the NFL logo. Inexplicably, he is holding up the very same trading card that he is on, creating a mind-bending card-ception loop. Behind Santa Claus, through a snow-covered window are two Pro Set executives dressed as elves (Leaf remade this card in 2021 with a selection of notable figures ranging from Donald Trump to Pele there instead, which can complicate searches for the more valuable original). The back of the card features Santa Claus’ vital info and a scouting report.
It was such a hit that Pro Set began putting Santa Claus cards into its sets starting in 1990. All of those were printed in far higher quantities, making them easy to obtain today, but the ‘89 card is still highly sought after, with “gem mint” PSA 10 graded copies selling for around $500 to $750.
As the sports card industry continued to innovate in the 1990s, it opened up new opportunities to celebrate the holidays through autograph and memorabilia cards. One of the first autographed cards of Santa Claus can be found in 1991’s Pro Line Portraits with the rarest version limited to 200 copies.
In 1998, Upper Deck produced an oversized Kris Kringle promo card featuring a velvety red piece of “holiday-worn jersey” that was exclusive to the company’s Collector’s Club members. The card can be found on eBay for around $20.
In 2007, Topps created the most comprehensive offering yet, with a special Santa Claus Holiday Set that contains 18 cards, all featuring versions of Santa Claus on Topps’ most popular designs of all time, including a Kris Kringle relic card, an autograph card, and a rookie card that pays homage to Mickey Mantle’s famous 1952 Topps card. Instead of being a “Topps Certified Autograph,” the signed card in this set is a “Topps Santafied Autograph,” with the back of the card insisting, “Santa himself signed this card with the very pen he uses to make his list of all the naughty and nice children around the world.” The back of the relic card, bearing a piece of Santa’s suit, says, “Topps acquired this suit from Santa himself, who requested it be spread as far and as wide as possible so everyone could have a piece of his holiday spirit to cherish and revisit whenever they wish.”
2007 Topps Holiday Set. (Photo: eBay)
In recent years, Topps has produced more Santa Claus autograph and relic cards for its holiday baseball sets (more on those in a minute), but the disclosures have gotten decidedly less whimsical. “The relic on this card is not from anything at all,” says the back of a 2019 offering.
Over the last decade or so, the hobby’s annual holiday set releases have produced more Santa Claus trading cards than ever before. In the most recent Topps Holiday set releases, collectors can pull rare chase cards of other classic North Pole characters such as Mrs. Claus, Frosty the Snowman, the Gingerbread Man, and more.
Holiday-themed sports sets
The sports card industry offers a few holiday-themed sets that bring a seasonal vibe to collecting with unique player-worn holiday sweater cards and festive super short print variations.
The main baseball card release centered around this festive time of the year is Topps Holiday. First produced in 2016, the set has holiday-inspired designs of the MLB’s rookies and stars where you can find hidden elves, snowflakes, and Christmas lights on cards. Collectors can pull autograph cards, player-worn Christmas hat relics, and those aforementioned rare relic/auto cards of Santa Claus. Topps Holiday sets are retail exclusives that can be found online and in stores like Target and Walmart.
2024 Topps Holiday Bobby Witt, Jr. image variation. (Photo: eBay)
A few years after the first Topps Holiday release, Panini, which produces NFL and NBA licensed trading cards, began offering Hoops Basketball and Donruss Football holiday-themed sets that have also become popular with collectors. In 2022 Donruss Football, Panini released a visually stunning Santa Claus Downtown insert. The ultra-rare case hit (there has traditionally been only one Downtown insert per every couple hundred packs) is still in massive demand, with PSA 10 copies selling for more than $1,500. The one-of-a-kind Clearly Donruss Holo parallel of this card sold for $3,234.71 in June of this year — a record high for a Santa Claus card, according to CardLadder’s database, which tracks card sales across major online marketplaces.
I would consider these products to be more collector-focused, with less monetary value on average than many other sets, but they offer plenty of chase cards and autograph relics of top rookies and stars that can still fetch hundreds of dollars. PSA 10 Topps Holiday base rookie cards of superstars like Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani sell for north of $100.
Classic holiday movie trading cards
This Peter Billingsley autographed A Christmas Story card sold for $750. (Photo: eBay)
One of my favorite holiday traditions is to sit back with a glass of eggnog and watch Christmas movies — a genre that is also making its way into trading card forms now. This year, actor Chevy Chase released a Christmas Vacation 35th Anniversary Box Set that offers signed cards of the Griswold family and personally used Chevy Chase relic cards. The limited edition release of 300 boxes quickly sold out, but a few have made it to eBay.
Cryptozoic Entertainment and Marquee Trading Cards recently put out a similar set based on the beloved holiday movie “A Christmas Story” to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the film’s release. Collectors have the chance to pull single and dual autograph cards signed by the cast, hand-drawn sketch cards, and serial-numbered chase cards. Sealed boxes are available on eBay for around $130 and a 1/1 Peter Billingsley (Ralphie) autograph card inscribed “I want a Red Ryder!” has already been pulled from a pack and sold for a penny shy of $1,000.
Billingsley also signed cards for Leaf, some with an “Oh fudge” inscription that are being sold for $99 each — exactly what someone might say after their loved ones find out they spent $99 on a Ralphie autographed card.
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(Top photo: Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
SALT LAKE CITY — Nick Bjugstad walked out of a meeting with the Utah coaching staff following Friday’s morning skate still in full uniform when somebody yelled, “Five minutes ‘til the first bus!”
“I can do it,” Bjugstad, in his 13th season, yelled back while laughing as he began to strip out of his gear.
But when he realized a Utah TV reporter wanted to grab him for an interview in advance of the club’s game against the Wild and he had also committed to doing a quick radio hit with the local Minnesota sports station, Bjugstad — the epitome of ‘Minnesota nice’ — said, “I’ll take the second bus.”
That’s when the director of team services approached and told Bjugstad he could Uber back to the team’s hotel. Just give him the receipt and he’d make sure Bjugstad was reimbursed.
As more than one person in the locker room joked, “There’s something that wouldn’t fly last year.”
In every conversation with a former Arizona Coyotes player, you can sense how refreshing it is to be playing for an owner — Ryan and Ashley Smith and the Smith Entertainment Group — so committed to treating them right after an accelerated $1.2 billion purchase to move an entire franchise virtually overnight.
This goes beyond a $20 Uber ride Bjugstad can easily afford.
Heck, just the mere fact Utah was staying at the Four Seasons in Minneapolis — voted the “Hotel of the Year” last season by 32 NHL clubs — was notable.
“There’s no excuses anymore,” said Utah general manager Bill Armstrong, who has brought most of his staff to Utah after three seasons running the Coyotes’ hockey operations. “We’ll stay in the best hotel in the city, we’ll make sure we have the best food on the road, the best of everything.
“So we’ve taken the excuse factor out of it. That’s all gone for us. We’re provided with the best so there’s no excuses in our organization. We’re still young, we’re still growing, we’re still getting better, but there’s no excuses as far as the way that we’re treated and all the assets we have to use to be the best.”
From the moment the players touched down in Salt Lake City last spring and were greeted by thousands in an airport hangar and an overstuffed Delta Center to welcome the new NHL franchise, Utah Hockey Club players have felt right at home.
“We walked in and basically we’re looking around like, ‘What is going on?’” Bjugstad said, smiling. “I couldn’t believe it. So that was how it started and then from there, it was just top-notch. Like seriously, treated like kings. Completely first class.
“This is nothing against Arizona. They have die-hard fans. But it became frustrating as players. We wanted news of what was going to happen and there was a lot of limbo for a long period there. So that was probably the most frustrating part. Players and staff, everyone got through it together and then we come here and it’s just a whole other world for us. And it’s fun for the guys that haven’t seen organizations like this and guys that have been in Arizona for so long or have only played for Arizona to come here, get treated so well and realize this is how it is other places. The amenities are great, the interactions with the Smiths have been huge and the fans are so excited.
“This is proof we just had to move on.”
Delta Center pic.twitter.com/ra0LzA998g
— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) December 11, 2024
In a single offseason, the Smith Entertainment Group renovated the bowels of Delta Center to give not just the home team a first-class locker room experience that includes a shared coaches room, weight room and trainer’s room with the Utah Jazz, but also the visiting team. NHLers experiencing a road game at Delta Center for the first time have been blown away by the size of the visitors room and the fact they have access to a full gym, hot tub, cold tub and a medical room that’s bigger than many in their home rinks.
They figured out a way to build a temporary practice facility at the Olympic Oval in Kearns, Utah that was used for speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics. They built a practice rink on an island right in the middle of the Oval, buying time for the permanent facility to be built by the fall of 2025 in nearby Sandy. The club quickly scooped up 111 acres of a shopping mall and is essentially gutting a Macy’s that will be transformed into a state-of-the-art facility to house the hockey club’s offices.
The Smiths are also leading a downtown revitalization proposal to reimagine a sports and entertainment district just east of Delta Center.
And over the next two or three offseasons for the Jazz and Utah Hockey Club, Delta Center will be renovated to create a better hockey viewing experience ahead of the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
Currently, there are 11,131 unobstructed seats in the arena and another 5,000 where portions of the ice can’t be seen. Luckily, the building has an enormous, picture-perfect center-ice scoreboard that fans can look at if they can’t see part of the game. Yet despite only counting the 11,131 unobstructed seats as capacity, well more than that have been attending games.
“We’re going to renovate the arena as quickly as we can,” said Chris Armstrong, Utah’s president of hockey operations and not related to Bill. “You start making major changes in the lower bowl and pushing the building out and doing things, we’re going to discover things along the way. Anybody who’s been through a house renovation knows about that.
“But we’re going to try and do it as expeditiously as we can, but we also want to get it right for the fans and during that process make it as minimally disruptive as we can for fans. We will focus on making as many unobstructed seats as we possibly can. We’ve had great demand for the limited view, the single goal view seats this year. People are hungry to get in the building and experience NHL hockey and the environment here at Delta Center. That’s exciting because people are still getting hooked on hockey while they wait for the renovations.”
One idea being played with is a section of seats from the glass to the top of one of the end zones, creating a continuous wall of fans. If that can be achieved, the suites and hospitality areas currently in that end zone would be moved to the other end zone.
Last Wednesday, a few hours before the game, Ryan Smith announced on X that he was giving away tickets for that night’s game against Vancouver, including eight seats in his suite. There was so much demand, Smith quickly got together with SeatGeek and gave away an additional 2,000 single-goal view seats for free. They disappeared in less than an hour.
Pretty neat from an owner who never watches games from inside his snazzy corner suite. Instead, in a tracksuit, he sits along the glass with guests that have included NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, several Jazz players such as former hockey player Lauri Markkanen, former NBA star Dwyane Wade, golfer Tony Finau and music stars Post Malone and Benson Boone.
That game against the Canucks? Utah rallied from a 2-0 deficit in the third period on goals fittingly by captain Clayton Keller and budding young star Dylan Guenther before Bill Armstrong’s big offseason acquisition, Mikhail Sergachev, won it in overtime.
To see and hear Delta Center erupt was another stark reminder these players are no longer playing in a 4,000-seat college rink as they did the previous two years in Tempe, Ariz.
Utah Hockey Club celebrates Mikhail Sergachev’s overtime goal against the Canucks. (Alex Goodlett / Getty Images)
“Listen, when you’re us and you haven’t had that luxury over the last few years to play out in front of a crowd that big and sold out, it’s a beautiful thing,” Bill Armstrong said. “And it gives you that little extra boost. Down 2-nothing in the third, I think the crowd was what put us over the edge.”
Things haven’t just been special off the ice for the Utah Hockey Club.
They are rolling on the ice, too.
Andre Tourigny’s club has won seven games in a row on the road and is 6-0-2 in its past eight, 8-1-3 in its past 12 and pulled within a point of a playoff spot in the Western Conference Sunday with a shootout loss to Anaheim.
This is no longer the Coyotes, where Armstrong’s edict was simply to meet the cap floor, acquire dead-money contracts for essentially retired players to help him do that and gobble up as many draft picks and prospects as possible.
Yet because of the latter, the future in Utah is bright with a core that includes Keller, Guenther, Logan Cooley, Lawson Crouse, Nick Schmaltz and Michael Kesselring (who has soared in the wake of injuries to Sean Durzi and John Marino) and prospects on the horizon such as Maveric Lamoureux, Tij Iginla, Dmitriy Simashev and Daniil But.
“A lot of people start a rebuild, not many people finish it,” Armstrong said. “You don’t want to change the plan depending on what’s going on day-to-day. But this summer, we were able to get some players like Sergachev to help push the process along. You’re getting some pieces that allow you that opportunity to become better and take that next step.
“It’s interesting — you got all the cap space, but that cap space goes quick with a couple of bad decisions. We just try to stay to the timelines and stay to the rebuild to be true to the sense that we want everybody roughly the same ages to some degree, to kind of grow together. The Sergachevs of the world joining the Kellers, the Crouses, and now the Cooleys and Guenthers and that. We added Cup winners — Sergachev, (Kevin) Stenlund, (Ian) Cole, (Robert) Bortuzzo. When we’re going through the rough times and we’re beat up physically and we have some injuries, those guys keep that ship going pretty straight for us.”
Armstrong laughed when asked what he considers the timeline for Utah’s rebuild.
“I was in Montreal last year and I pointed to the banner when somebody asked me the same question,” Armstrong said. “I pointed to their last Cup banner and I go, ‘Thirty years ago you won a Stanley Cup.’ There’s a patience aspect that has to go into this where you have to look at the numbers and you’ve got to do the research. The research is that the quickest team ever to come out of the rebuild was the Penguins and they did it with Sidney Crosby, Marc-Andre Fleury, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang and they did it within a five-year period. Most rebuilds are somewhere between five to 16 years sometimes to get it done.
“We’re in Year 4 and we’ve been able to, because of COVID and the bad contracts, we were able to accelerate that in the sense of we were able to get a lot more quantity of really good prospects early on. They’re going to filter in the next three to four years. But the good news is the team on the ice right now is a good team and then we’re going to look to add one or two of our prospects to come in over the next few years and you’ll see the team kind of grow and get better.”
But as Armstrong quickly reiterated, the excuse factor of the Coyotes’ yesteryear and their old ownership is gone.
“When you talk about the bull—-, you’re dealing with the negative,” Armstrong said. “Constant stories of negativity. After a while, that gets to players. They want to go to the rink and concentrate on hockey and whether you play bad or well or good, you’re just dealing with hockey. So that makes it easier for the players instead of all the negativity that they couldn’t control that surrounded them.
“So on this end, it’s been really a positive thing and I think our players finally feel like they’re a top-notch NHL franchise. The Smiths have gone above and beyond. The NHL has taken something that was bad and made it good. (Bettman) deserves a lot of credit along with Ryan and Ashley and Chris Armstrong on how they’ve been able to transform it.”
Utah’s eventual nickname and logo are in the final stages and will be announced this offseason, Chris Armstrong said. On Nov. 15, Utah jerseys went on sale and sold out in 24 hours.
Fans lined up at the team store, and Utah set a Delta Center single-day sports event sales record. It beat the previous record — set at its inaugural game against the Chicago Blackhawks on Oct. 8 when other merchandise was available — by 48 percent.
In fact, only one game in NHL regular-season and playoff history had a higher single-game net merchandise sales total: the Golden Knights’ clinching win in Game 5 of the 2023 Stanley Cup Final at T-Mobile Arena on June 23, 2023.
Utah’s closing in on a playoff spot, but you also won’t catch Bill Armstrong jumping for joy and getting ahead of himself just yet.
“It’s been nice for the guys to be rewarded with this win streak,” Armstrong said. “But there’s no nights off in the NHL. I mean, the greatest thing that you can say about our league is the parity. Every night’s a battle. So just when you think you got it mastered, you don’t. Success in the NHL is rented, and rent’s due every day.”
(Photos of Clayton Keller, Delta Center and Ryan Smith: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)
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