The mood at the UAE Team Emirates-XRG team bus on Saturday evening in the Giro d'Italia car park on the outskirts of Veliko Tarnovo was anything but upbeat.
During stage 2 in Bulgaria, a mass crash saw two of their top riders, Jay Vine and Marc Soler, both forced to abandon. Their GC contender, Adam Yates, also fell badly, losing a chunk of time and all hope in the overall battle. Another two UAE riders, Antonio Morgado and Jhonatan Narváez, also went down.
The mass pileup, the second in the Giro finale in as many days, happened with some 21km to go, bringing down well over a dozen riders, five of them from UAE Team Emirates-XRG. So many injuries forced the race to be briefly neutralised as all the ambulances were needed to handle the fallout from the crash.
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Soler, one of the first to fall, according to directeur sportif Fabio Baldato, abandoned shortly afterwards, while Adam Yates, his face visibly bloodied, was able to continue. However, he endured a time loss by the end of the stage of 13:46.
Vine and Soler, meanwhile, both left the races in ambulances directly from the crash.
"Adam had a lot of blood on his face from the crash; he had a cut behind the ear," Baldato told a small group of reporters, including Cyclingnews, at the team bus, after the finish. "We checked him over, so we'll see what the doctor says.
"Then I was with Jay Vine, he was complaining about pain in the same arm that had got hurt in Down Under. Soler had an issue with his leg, so we'll see what the doctor says about that, too.
"Only Mikkel Bjerg, Jan Christen and Arrieta managed to stay on their bikes, and even Arrieta's bike broke at one point."
Baldato said that he had already reviewed images of the mass fall and had seen that Soler was one of the first to crash just when the peloton was picking up speed for the key late third-category climb at the Lyaskovets Monastery Pass.
"It was a fast crash. His front wheel went from under him. The road was really slippery. It was basically like a chain reaction," he said.
Right from the WorldTour opener at the Tour Down Under, UAE Team Emirates-XRG have had a difficult season with a large number of riders either falling sick or injured. Although their star name, Tadej Pogačar, has not been affected, riders of the calibre of Vine, Tim Wellens and Mikkel Bjerg have all had to spend time away from racing even before the Giro.
"Some years are like that," Baldato said simply, when it was put to him that it was being a particularly tough season for UAE on the injury front.
"We've still got Christen, Narváez, and Morgado here, and I hope we can get Adam back, too; he can maybe do something in the mountains."
"He's lost so much time that the GC classification will be difficult, but if he's OK, there are still some good stages for him. The most important thing, in any case, is that the guys manage to recover."
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