Enough is enough: UAE adds moto protection for Pogačar when training

Sharing the road is becoming increasingly complicated for cycling’s biggest names. What used to be isolated flare-ups are now happening often enough to force teams to react.

This year alone, there’ve been a bunch of weird incidents. Earlier this season, Jonas Vingegaard had a nasty wipe-out on a descent. It happened when the Dane was being followed by a fan during a training ride–a little too close, it seemed. The crash ended up forcing him to bail on his planned 2026 debut at the UAE Tour. More importantly, the crash intensified concerns about how exposed riders are during open-road training.

Fans and Pogi

Now world champion Tadej Pogačar has found himself in a similar spotlight. The Slovenian revealed on Strava that a follower made an obscene gesture after Pogačar asked him to wait a couple of minutes for a photo while he finished a conversation. “I am the first one who defends the fan, and I am the first one who stops every day to take photos,” Pogačar said. “But sometimes you have to understand that you don’t go to someone’s work to record a video… For them it is leisure time, but for the cyclist it is work time. It’s hard to balance things up.”

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At the UAE camp, sports manager Joxean Fernández Matxin addressed the issue in an interview with AS, highlighting what he described as a trend of riders being filmed in traffic for social media. “This is a matter of moments and more views, something that is very fashionable,” he said. “If at that moment a cyclist gives you a bad answer because you see a car coming from the front… possibly the one who comes out badly is the one who gives that answer, when the context is totally different,” he told AS.

So, UAE has begun using motorcycles to help smaller training groups, particularly around Pogačar. “We have gone with a motorcycle to defend Tadej,” Matxin said to AS. “Now what we do is put a motorcycle behind Tadej so that there is respect for that small group and the cars can pass and not generate a caravan of kilometres.”

Matxin’s message, however, was not confrontational. “We all have to put ourselves in each other’s shoes,” he said — a reminder that respect has to run both ways.

Pogi will be back racing soon–his first race of the year is Strade Bianche on March 7.