Since emerging into the sport taking over the Alé-BTC Ljubljana WorldTeam licence in four years ago, UAE Team ADQ have been constantly developing into one of the sport's leading teams. Perhaps the biggest sign was adding Elisa Longo Borghini for the 2025 season, where she won second GC titles at both the Giro d'Italia Women and the UAE Tour Women.
The team are currently racing their home race, the UAE Tour Women, bringing huge pressure, and they don't just have eyes on taking a second consecutive GC with Longo Borghini, but also winning the sprint stages ahead of Sunday's Queen stage to Jebel Hafeet.
To that end, they've recruited legendary German sprinter André Greipel, winner of 11 Tour de France stages, to help their fast women challenge the dominance of Lorena Wiebes and her SD Worx-Protime squad. This is Greipel's second season with the team, though he has stepped up his involvement for 2026, a move which has already reaped benefits.
Through they've been unable to unseat Wiebes on either of the opening two stages, they came close, Lara Gillespie finishing second on day one, just behind the prolific Dutchwoman, and further back on Friday's chaotic second stage. But there's still one more sprint stage for them to try, but how do they beat Wiebes?
"The best is to drop her before the sprint, that's the safest way," Griepel told Cyclingnews at the Dubai Police Academy, just before Friday's second stage rolled out.
"Yesterday we were close, you just have to grab every chance you can do to prepare a really good lead out and if she's out of position we can manage to beat her, but for the moment it's quite difficult because she hardly makes mistakes and obviously she's the fastest at the moment.
"You can see that she steps on the pedals she's way far ahead of the other sprinters her, but there's always a moment when she also can do mistakes and we need to take profit from that.
"We try to perform as a team, especially in the lead outs, we trust the sprinter who's at the end of the lead out, that's what we want to improve throughout the season, but I already think that creates pressure for her."
While training is training, few plans survive the first contact with the race, so once one is made and the team is racing, Griepel will head up the road scouting the route and ensuring any relevant information is passed back. On stage 1 we saw the UAE team trying to make a difference in cross winds, though the conditions made that impossible, and the team knew all about the head wind sprint because he had checked it.
Greipel retired from racing in 2021 boasting a mighty haul of 158 race victories, including 22 Grand Tour wins, and making the transition from the men's peloton to the women's has been interesting for the 43-year-old.
"For sure the men they are longer in the sport than some women, [there are] women in the bunch who picked up cycling maybe three years ago, so every day is a teaching process and they can learn something new.
"They are really open to listen and learn what a sport director has to say, a trainer or even myself, also they are really open to get feedback. They want to learn and in men's cycling it's a bit different, everybody knows a bit better," he said.
Greipel has seen the women's sport is becoming more equal making tactics a more important part of winning.
"I think it is really helpful if you have someone who can tell them in certain scenarios what would be a good idea during the race and I think this would make the difference now to make the right choices and tactics."
