Adam Yates deliberates when asked a question about his brother and Tour de France rival, Simon Yates.
If the fraternal twins were to swap kits, would anyone in their respective teams, UAE Team Emirates and Jayco-Alula, be able to tell?
“Ahhhhhhhhhh,” Adam says with contemplation.
“Maybe. He’s a little bit skinnier than me right now, so maybe, but I don’t know.”
At Jayco-Alula, former Paris-Roubaix winner turned sports director Mathew Hayman seems equally unsure if he could tell Simon from Adam.
“I often start telling a story about when we were doing a race together and Adam’s like, ‘Nah, that was my brother,” Hayman says.
“I find it difficult. I have twins myself, but one is a boy and the other is a girl, so I am able to tell them apart.”
Tongue-in-cheek, you could call it a potential marginal gain, though one neither have needed at this Tour, with both Adam and Simon set to celebrate career-best finishes.
The Yates brothers will finish in Paris on Sunday, as close as they started it, with Adam placed third and Simon fourth on the general classification. The pair duked it out for honours on stage one, with Adam taking the win and the first yellow jersey of the race.
In the mountains on various stages they would, despite their clear, contrasting team strategies, somehow find each other in the melee of media, fans, team staff, bikes, cameras and cars at the finish to roll down to the paddock together.
On Saturday’s penultimate stage in the Vosges, the Yates twins appeared on the road together again, riding almost in unison to bridge to the lead group containing Adam’s teammate Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) and Felix Gall (AG2R Citroen).
Riding out of the saddle at the same time, both shifted, left, then right, left, then right, as if being pulled by the same length of string controlled by the same puppeteer. Identical twins even in the biggest moment of the stage.
Simon’s focus was on a stage win and moving up to fourth overall, Adam’s focus was to support Pogacar, who would win the stage and finish the Tour runner-up, and defend his third place.
There was business on the road, but also brotherly love, not sibling rivalry.
Simon’s face was covered in light brown dirt, an airway strip still fixed across the bridge of his nose, when he dismounted his bike outside his team bus at the finish.
He shook slightly, maybe from the effort of the day, the effort of three weeks of hard and fast racing,…
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