While he himself has not raced yet in 2026, the multitude of crashes that have plagued the early racing season have been unkind to Tadej Pogačar, with several of his key UAE Team Emirates-XRG lieutenants for the Classics now out with injury.
Tim Wellens’s injury is the latest blow to UAE’s firepower, crashing hard at Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne on Sunday and suffering a right collarbone fracture. The Belgian Champion confirmed yesterday on his Instagram that there would be no Classics campaign for him this year.
“Very disappointed to miss the upcoming races, but I’ll be fully supporting my teammates from home. Thank you everyone for all the messages — replies might be a bit slower for now with only one arm.”
Wellens joins Jhonatan Narváez as the highest-profile missing pieces in Pogačar’s ideal support squad for his one-day racing calendar, with the Ecuadorian Champion out of action due to sustaining “several stable thoracic vertebrae compression fractures” in a crash at the Tour Down Under in January.
Two weeks later at Milan-San Remo, Wellens was the second last man and Narváez the final man in UAE’s rapid lead-out up the Cipressa, where Pogačar launched an all-out assault on the course that only Filippo Ganna and eventual race-winner Mathieu van der Poel could follow in full.
In the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, Pogačar freelanced more in the key stages, latching onto the moves of Van der Poel and Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), but Narváez was part of the squad at the former, Wellens in both, and they would’ve played an essential role in the early positioning.
Mikkel Bjerg also raced both cobbled Monuments as support for the Slovenian in 2025 – featuring especially strongly in Flanders, which is no surprise as a former top-five finisher in his own right – but UAE may be without his support, too, after he was…
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