Sick soldiers and mixed messages – What's really going on at UAE Team Emirates-XRG and how will it change the last days of the Tour de France?

And just like that, the Tour de France changes again. We were only just getting accustomed to the tactical complexion of a race without Jonas Vingegaard but now, with two mountain stages remaining, we have the strongest team in the race, the team of the yellow jersey, dropping like flies.

Brandon McNulty is in his hotel room booking a flight from Geneva airport. Adam Yates is battling a stomach issue and riding on empty. Tim Wellens has a sore throat and only just made the time cut on Thursday. And it also transpires that Florian Vermeersch is carrying an injury. That’s one man down for Tadej Pogačar, three below their best, and just three fully fit – as far as we know – going into a crucial Alpe d’Huez double header.

The as ‘far as we know’ feels important here. This wave of illness and injury is dramatic enough, but UAE Team Emirates-XRG, in their efforts to play down the intrigue, have only hammed it up.

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Outside the team bus at the start of Thursday’s stage 18, both team boss Mauro Gianetti and sporting manager Joxean Fernández Matxin, played down the early rumours that other riders were coming down with illness. At the very same time, Wellens was in the mixed zone revealing to the Belgian media that he had a sore throat. Not only that, but Wellens’ stated that all riders ate separately in their rooms the previous night, at the same time as Gianetti was saying it was just Yates who was isolated.

More remarkably still, at the finish in Orcières-Merlette, Matxin attempted to deny that Wellens was sick. Matxin’s English can be slightly unclear at times but this was unmistakable: “He’s not sick, he’s not sick.” He appeared to then claim it was normal that Wellens dropped back later in the stage to save his legs. That would be the same Tim Wellens who crawled to the line two minutes inside the time cut and told us: “It is pretty clear there is some illness in the team.”

The mixed messages are bizarre, only adding to the sense that there’s something amiss and something to hide. Is it really respiratory issues for Wellens and McNulty? Is the stomach bug more widespread? The contradictions erode trust, and they also echo through the peloton.

Pallor and possibilities

On the surface, it would seem that Pogačar is healthy, but already there are whispers about his pallor and a suggestion on French national television that he wore black shorts as it would be easier to hide a, let’s just say, stomach issue. Yes, this theory was not just confined to social media but seriously put forward by a former pro.

And so, we go into a final double-header of mountain stages with the race not quite as wrapped up as we thought it was.

Don’t get me wrong, the only way Pogačar loses this race is if he comes down with illness himself. Provided he stays relatively healthy, he can see this race through even if all his teammates go home. He has more than four minutes in hand and is so superior to his remaining rivals that he would surely be able to defend himself against anything thrown his way on the next two days.

In this light, Jonas Vingegaard’s exit from the race on Sunday starts to feel like even more of a shame. If there was anyone capable of testing and exploiting that hint of weakness in the UAE Team Emirates camp it was the Dane and his Visma-Lease a Bike teammates.

In his absence, you have a Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) who has already stated he’s racing for second place and has lost the only teammate realistically capable of helping him in the mountains. You have Pogačar’s own teammate Isaac del Toro in third, and in fourth you have a 19-year-old, Paul Seixas (Decathlon CMA CGM), who is probably not looking beyond Del Toro’s podium spot and white jersey.

Although it’s a long shot to envisage any sort of raids that truly threaten the yellow jersey, what we’re likely to see on the next two mountain stages is more open racing, and that starts with the breakaways.

Stifled for much of this Tour by the collective might and will of UAE, George Bennett (NSN Cycling) said at the finish in Orcières-Merlette that the escape artists would now “smell blood”.

A depleted UAE might struggle to control the breakaway as they have done in the past, which has two ramifications, the first being that they will have less of a grip on who exactly slips up the road, and the second that they will have less firepower to chase that break down to set up a stage win for Pogačar.

Now, the 25-time stage winner with a four-minute lead doesn’t need stage wins, but the talk is that he has his sights firmly set on an Alpe d’Huez triumph to further cement his place in the legend of the Tour de France. That just became much harder to pull off.

The real Alpe d’Huez comes on Friday on stage 19, but Saturday’s monstrosity over the Croix de Fer, Télégraphe, Galibier, and Sarenne is the truly pivotal stage from a general classification perspective. Any sign of weakness there will be punished in multiples, so while his teammates could continue to drop like flies, the threat of contagion hanging over Pogačar himself does inject a degree of jeopardy and tension back into this Tour de France.

Suddenly, thanks in no small part to the race leader's own team, we have drama, we have intrigue, and we have a peloton that's determined to throw down some moves through these two last dances in the Alps.

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