Management for UAE Team Emirates predict Remco Evenepoel’s announcement earlier this week that he may well 'loan out' the Vuelta a España leader’s jersey on stage 6 will spark cycling’s equivalent of a feeding frenzy.
When the Soudal-QuickStep rider and defending Vuelta champion regained la roja on stage 3 in Andorra on Monday, he said he would try to lose it as soon as possible to try to save his team energy in defending it at all costs. With two sprint stages following, he pointed to Thursday's mountainous stage, which includes a summit finish at Javalambre, as the first big realistic opportunity.
The consequence of announcing his willingness to hand over the red jersey to a non-GC threat will be “total war” en route to the summit finish, UAE Team Emirates manager Joxean Fernandez Matxin told Cyclingnews.
“It’s like throwing a ball up in the air and everybody wants to jump up to grab it,” Matxin said with a grin.
“Sixty, 70 kilometres can go by in a flash, it’s total war. There could be 70 or 100 guys going for it. Which is bad in one way for the GC teams, but in another way, it’s good because the race controls itself. Suddenly, 80 kilometres go by, the break’s gone and you don’t have to do a thing.
“The other possibility's not so good: 40 guys go up the road and suddenly there are four or five up there that you don’t want to be in the move.”
At the same time, Matxin warned that it’s impossible to speculate excessively about what Soudal-QuickStep might or might not do, regardless of what Evenepoel had promised.
“All we can do is our own race, we can’t make QuickStep adopt a particular strategy,” Matxin said. “We can't predict what they’ll do too closely. It’s an important stage, and the breakaway could well decide who gets the lead.”
Although Matxin pointed to the two Jumbo leaders and Evenepoel as the top favourites, UAE Team Emirates were in the thick of the action at Andorra's first summit finish with their leaders Juan Ayuso and João Almeida, with Ayuso putting in one stinging attack and both UAE riders finishing in the front group.
Evenepoel won, of course, but it cannot be doubted that UAE are going into the second big mountain stage of the Vuelta with high morale: Ayuso is currently running ninth at 38 seconds on Evenepoel, teammate Marc Soler is 10th at 42 seconds and Almeida is 11th at 42 seconds.
“We just have to take it step by step. What the main favourites do is something we can’t control, and we just have to up there," said Matxin.
“What was interesting about Monday was the way Jumbo kept control of the race for the first half of the stage to Andorra. But then even if they have four or five top climbing names here, they suddenly didn’t do nearly much work on the front in the moujntains themselves.”
That situation, that sudden easing of their control, could only be explained and then resolved in two ways, Matxin said.
"First the other rivals teams thought that perhaps one of the Jumbo top names wasn’t going as well as planned so the rivals moved to the front to test them. And secondly the rivals then tried to go for the stage win.
“We tried out both strategies in Andorra” - first firing Ayuso off the front, then raising the pace - “but it turned out that in fact the Jumbo guys were doing fine.”
In the process, in any case, UAE showed that their two GC leaders were both in great shape and that knowledge will be invaluable for the Javalambre stage, Matxin said. The only question is how to use it the best.
“We knew our own riders levels were really good, but we had no idea what the other teams were like. Remco and the two Jumbos are the big, big candidates for the overall victory, and I think that Ayuso should be up there fighting with them. Then João is a super-consistent rider who always gets better and better in a Grand Tour, and if you're his rival, you always have to keep a very close eye on him too.”
Whatever happens in Javalambre, Matxin concludes, there is still “95 percent of the mountain climbing to come. A long way to go. I think Andorra was inevitably a very hard stage, because if you go anywhere in Andorra barring the capital, you’re either going uphill or downhill.
"Javalambre is a very demanding climb, too, and then there are some more tough stages to come in this first week. But this is only just beginning and there are sure to be surprises.”
