Broccolidwarf said:
Leinster said:
Evans wasn't ever popular outside of Australia. I think even some Aussies find him a bit prickly.
He got popular towards the end of his career, when he started being more open and friendly towards fans and press.
So with Evans it kinda depends when in his career you judge his popularity.
Cadel Evans was the most hostile to the media of any major cyclist, and is still legendary for some of his confrontations. 'A bit prickly' is kind of an understatement, 'a bit psychotic' was the impression he made, therefore the public came to believe the same
https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/cadel-evans-greatest-youtube-hits-156232
Some of Evans' 'greatest hits' are at that link, and those are just the incidents which were caught on video, there were a lot more verbal and physical confrontations in his early career. Evans was an emotionally disturbed child because he got brain damage by being kicked in the head by a horse. Then he was bullied by kids in school because of the deformation of his depressed-fracture on his skull after the brain surgery.
The way he became more popular was like: "Everybody loves a winner" when he started to get top wins, "underdog narrative", and being one of the few clean-ish cyclists in the midst of a dozen or more top TdF riders who were involved in doping. In fact in retrospect, Evans is the
only one of the 2005 TdF top-10 finishers not to have tested positive, or be clearly implicated in doping. Or, in 2008 there was Sastre and Kirchen and nobody else, 'clean'. Evans did kind of get away with his association with Dr. Ferrari though. And especially, Evans got more popular by learning to control his public behavioral problems and be 'nicer' to people