So far in this Tour de France, one of the major themes has been UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s stifling of the breakaways, with Tadej Pogačar helping himself to three stage victories, handing one to his teammate Isaac del Toro, and overseeing a pattern baroudeurs being kept on very tight leashes.
But the tables were turned on Friday, as UAE got in on the action themselves, firing three of their eight riders up the road.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. UAE have been unwaveringly strong since the race began but even they felt what was coming on Friday was as good as uncontrollable.
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With major GC shake-outs expected on Saturday and Sunday, Friday’s stage had breakaway written all over it, not least due to the anxiety and even ill-feeling that has been brewing among the teams who’d hedged their Tour de France bets on the breakaways.
In the end, a whopping 58 riders made it up the road – almost a peloton in itself – and UAE threw themselves into it.
“The plan was to be in front, with Felix [Großschartner], Brandon [McNulty] and me, if there was a big group that would go away that we would be in it, and that is exactly what happened,” Tim Wellens told Cyclingnews outside the UAE bus in Belfort.
They were there to take the pressure off the rest of the team, reducing the need for the others to control the peloton. In fact, we heard on race radio a UAE director saying that they could let the gap grow out to around seven minutes and then other teams would step in – and that’s exactly what happened as Bahrain Victorious, who have Lenny Martinez in ninth place, got spooked by 10th-placed Tom Pidcock’s (Pinarello Q36.5) presence up the road.
Bahrain worked at the head of the peloton for much of the day, and as the breakaway hit the day’s two key climbs, Wellens, McNulty and Großschartner could begin to race for themselves for the first time in this Tour.
In the end, Wellens and McNulty made it into the final 10-man selection but victory slipped away as Mauro Schmid and Harold Tejada stole up the road in the finale. McNulty launched a last-gap solo bid to chase them down but settled for fifth, with Wellens ninth.
“It’s super fun to decide the race. I think everybody wants to be in UAE Team Emirates-XRG because you can decide a little bit how the race happens,” Wellens said, in a message that might not land so softly among the other teams.
“It’s much nicer to do this than just follow all day,” he added.
The teams classification question
Stage 13 gave UAE Team Emirates-XRG the chance to give some of their peloton-pullers a rest, and others a chance to race for themselves, but there was another potential factor: the teams classification.
This has been a bit of a whisper at this Tour, with numerous rival teams speculating that UAE have kept such a tight leash on breakaways because they are actively targeting teams classification.
The team have played this down, with Team Manager Joxean Fernandez Matxin told Cyclingnews this morning that it had nothing to do with the way they’ve managed the breakaways so far.
And yet, McNulty's and Wellens’ time gains on Friday saw the team make a sizable jump in the teams classification, closing the gap on the leaders Lidl-Trek from 24 minutes to just over nine minutes.
The teams classification is calculated by adding together the times of each team’s top three riders on each stage, and bundling them into a rolling, general ranking.
“We are doing well in the team classification, so that is a nice bonus. Everyone likes to be on the podium in Paris, and it would be a shame to ride so strongly as a team and then not win the team classification,” said Wellens.
“If we manage to do that, it is of course a nice bonus. If we hadn't been in the breakaway, we wouldn't be riding ourselves into the ground trying to close the gap. So it is a nice bonus, but not a must.”
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