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The 2023 UAE Tour has seen Remco Evenepoel take another step forward towards the Giro d’Italia, Luke Plapp claim a WorldTour podium for the first time, and Adam Yates net his first stage victory with UAE Team Emirates.
It also saw Mark Cavendish race with Astana Qazaqstan and with new lead-out man Cees Bol. Their journey together towards success at the Tour de France began in the Middle East.
Ten years Cavendish’s junior, Bol grew up watching the Manxman win stage after stage of the Tour de France on television.
One he remembered in particular was “that iconic video on the Champs Elysées with Mark Renshaw leading him out in 2011 – I’ve watched that so many times,” Bol told a small group of reporters, including Cyclingnews, before stage 7 of the UAE Tour.
While doing the same successful lead out for Cavendish this July would be a dream for Bol, right now, the two are still laying the foundations of their sprint lead-out.
“It’s been going well, he’s a nice guy,” Bol said.
“Obviously he has a lot of experience and that’s always good. It’s always a bit hard in the beginning, especially in this race where it’s super-difficult to get a good lead-out and we need to get used to each other at the same time. So it’s been a challenging week but I think we have taken some good steps.”
If the UAE Tour has been something of a baptism of fire for the pair, it’s worth remembering the race had one of the highest-quality sprint fields of the season. The UAE Tour is dubbed the ‘World Championships for sprinters.’
The combination of broad, flat roads and easy stages meant every rider was heading into the final kilometres fresh and at full tilt. That is hard for even the most experienced lead-out trains to deal with, judging by comments from sprint teams last week.
For a new combination, it is even more challenging.
Bol says they made a fair amount of progress on working together, although the only way to get an effective lead-out fully nailed down is working together at a lot of different races.
“You need racing. You can train for the physical effort you’re making, but the chaos in the peloton, the timing and how to read a race is only something you can do in a race.
“During all my time as a pro I’ve always been leading out and sprinting myself, so I’m quite used to it. It’s nice not to always have the same role in the team, too, and this year that’s how it’ll be, I guess.”
Their results in the UAE Tour bore little relation to the work in progress behind the scenes.
Cavendish…
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