[the_ad id="5357"]
[ad_1]
Life begins at 30, they say, and as Adam Yates moves into his fourth decade and tenth pro season with a fresh start at UAE Team Emirates, he’s still not ruling out his options in the Grand Tour GC battles. And that’s despite having a team leader named Tadej Pogačar.
When Ineos Grenadiers announced their 2022 Tour de France, Yates was one of three riders with protected status together with Dani Martínez and Geraint Thomas. But in UAE Team Emirates, the presence of a double Tour de France winner like Pogačar makes that kind of egalitarian hierarchy virtually impossible, at least next July.
Either way, Yates says, his options as a Plan B for overall battles are not going to evaporate despite the much clearer GC structure in his new team.
“There’s one big superstar and after that a lot of young guys with a lot of potential and a lot of results. But you can’t just have one leader all the time,” Yates told a small group of reporters at the UAE team training camp this week.
“These days you need your backup, and who knows if somebody gets injured or sick and they need me to do something then I can step up.”
“Just because I changed teams doesn’t mean I’ve gone down a level, my levels are still the same,” Yates, ninth in this year’s Tour despite being battered by illness but whose best result on the books remains fourth overall in the 2016 race, says a fraction defensively.
“But there are a lot of good riders here. So, like in Ineos where we always went into the Grand Tours with two or three options because someone can get sick or injured, [maybe] get COVID. It’d be silly these days to invest that much money in riders and not have a second option.”
As for exactly where he could have options as top rider, Yates says he is not overly bothered. “I’m not fussy, it doesn’t matter what race, I’ve been like that all my life, I’ll get stuck in. And if the team ask me to help the other guys, I’ll do that and respect that, too.”
This is no exaggeration. In 2018, Yates formed part of the Mitchelton-Scott Vuelta a España team, mainly with the aim of being a force in the mountains that his brother Simon, en route to overall victory, could rely on in the third week. Fast forward four years and in the Tour de France this July, Yates was equally happy to support Thomas in the Pyrenees.
This begs the question as to why, if he knows how to play his cards and switch roles no matter the situation, Yates had moved on from Ineos at all….
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…
[ad_2]