UAE Tour: Mark Cavendish takes sprint win on stage 2

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Mark Cavendish (QuickStep-AlphaVinyl) claimed a storming sprint victory on stage 2 of the UAE Tour, holding off stage 1 winner Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Fenix) in a rapid run to the line at Abu Dhabi breakwater. 

Despite the headwind sprint, Cavendish hit out early and it paid off. He burst into the lead as Sam Bennett (Bora-Hansgrohe) was being led out, and the Irishman then found himself boxed in and unable to sprint. 

Philipsen, in the red leader’s jersey, came up late and and gave Cavendish a good run for his money but the QuickStep-Alpha-Vinyl sprinter, making the most of his low aerodynamic position, held on to win by half a wheel. 

Pascal Ackermann (UAE Team Emirates) claimed the final spot on the podium but there was clear daylight behind Cavendish and Philipsen, who kept the leader's red jersey.

“I’m just happy,” said Cavendish who picked up his second win of the season and the 158th win of his long career, after a stage of the Tour of Oman last week. 

“I knew we could win here but it’s more so the way the team worked today. A third of the team here are first-year pros but today they rode like seasoned professionals. The job was to get me to the final as fresh as possible and they did it so well that I could go for 300-250 metres into a headwind. That’s usually too far, but they delivered me so far I knew I’d have energy to keep it to the line.”

On a day where the wind often threatened but never had an impact on the race, Cavendish’s QuickStep-AlphaVinyl teammates did not take a commanding role as big lead-out trains jostled for the front on the wide boulevards of the final kilometres. However, they got their man to the front when it mattered most. 

Cavendish wasn’t actually in the wheel of his lead-out man Michael Morkov when the Dane hit the front in the final 500 metres, before looking around and peeling off to force Bennett’s lead-out man, Danny van Poppel onto the front. But at that point, Cavendish decided to open up and stormed past through a gap and a slight left-hand bend, which effectively left Bennett trapped on the inside behind his own lead-out. 

Philipsen started sprinting at the same time as Cavendish, thinking along the same lines and finding a way through on the right. He came at Cavendish with high speed and gained on him all the way to the line, but his nemesis from last year’s Tour de France refused to fade and could raise his arms in celebration once again.

How it unfolded

The 176km stage started on the Hudayriat Island off Abu Dhabi, and headed into the desert and suburb of Abu Dhabi before returning for a finish by the nearby Abu Dhabi breakwater. The flat stage profile always lent itself to a full bunch finish, but the wind was up and so was the anticipation of splits and echelons. 

A tailwind accompanied them out of town and the first turn into crosswinds on exposed terrain brought a big surge in pace. Ineos Grenadiers, BikeExchange-Jayco, and Groupama-FDJ helped raise the pace to 65km/h and succeeded in splitting the field, with a group of 30 clipping off the front. 

It didn’t last, and the peloton reformed, but it did flare up again several kilometres later. Once more, a push from a few teams, with the wind now coming from the left, stretched the bunch to breaking point but with no lasting consequences. 

Each surge saw the gap to the day’s early three-man breakaway slashed, before the lulls allowed them to set about rebuilding their advantage. Curiously the break was an all-Gazprom-RusVelo affair, with the Russian team sending Michael Kukrle, Dmitriy Strakhov, and Pavel Kochetkov up the road. They took their lead out to three minutes once things had settled down with 85km to go. 

As he did at the early intermediate sprint, Strakhov crossed first at the second one with 40km to go to extend his lead in the black jersey classification. Soon after, the trio sat up and were absorbed by the peloton. 

From there, the race entered a relaxed phase as they rode into a strong headwind blowing across the exposed Al Jubail island. At one point, the pace was so slow that Philipsen dismounted and started running with his bike alongside the bunch. The organisers might not have appreciated their race leader showing just how slow and uneventful the race was at that point, but it nevertheless went far and wide on social media. 

Things did pick up when the peloton turned onto the coast in the final 15km but it was soon apparent that the wind would have no real impact on the day and that it would be a traditional bunch sprint run-in. 

The four-land boulevard offered ample room for lead-out trains to assemble, and it was Israel-Premier Tech and BikeExchange-Jayco who set up on opposite sides in the final two kilometres. Bora-Hansgrohe then turned up and muscled their way right into the middle of the BikeExchange train, much to the annoyance of Dylan Groenwegen’s men. 

They were all battling for the lead into a sweeping right-hand bend with 1400m to go, and Israel and BikeExchange and Bora-Hansgrohe went side by side into it. 

BikeExchange took it up as Bora-Hansgrohe then moved out to form their own line, but Arnaud Demare’s Groupama-FDJ team then moved up on the left. Meanwhile, Cavendish was being piloted through the middle, eventually settling on Bennett’s wheel as Morkov hit the front.

Morkov looked around, wisely pulled off, and Cavendish thought on his feet, sensing an opportunity. It was a considerable risk, but he clearly had the speed and strength to make it pay.