Management for UAE Team Emirates predict Remco Evenepoel’s announcement earlier this week that he may well ‘loan out’ the Vuelta a España leader’s jersey on stage 6 will spark cycling’s equivalent of a feeding frenzy.
When the Soudal-QuickStep rider and defending Vuelta champion regained la roja on stage 3 in Andorra on Monday, he said he would try to lose it as soon as possible to try to save his team energy in defending it at all costs. With two sprint stages following, he pointed to Thursday’s mountainous stage, which includes a summit finish at Javalambre, as the first big realistic opportunity.
The consequence of announcing his willingness to hand over the red jersey to a non-GC threat will be “total war” en route to the summit finish, UAE Team Emirates manager Joxean Fernandez Matxin told Cyclingnews.
“It’s like throwing a ball up in the air and everybody wants to jump up to grab it,” Matxin said with a grin.
“Sixty, 70 kilometres can go by in a flash, it’s total war. There could be 70 or 100 guys going for it. Which is bad in one way for the GC teams, but in another way, it’s good because the race controls itself. Suddenly, 80 kilometres go by, the break’s gone and you don’t have to do a thing.
“The other possibility’s not so good: 40 guys go up the road and suddenly there are four or five up there that you don’t want to be in the move.”
At the same time, Matxin warned that it’s impossible to speculate excessively about what Soudal-QuickStep might or might not do, regardless of what Evenepoel had promised.
“All we can do is our own race, we can’t make QuickStep adopt a particular strategy,” Matxin said. “We can’t predict what they’ll do too closely. It’s an important stage, and the breakaway could well decide who gets the lead.”
Although Matxin pointed to the two Jumbo leaders and Evenepoel as the top favourites, UAE Team Emirates were in the thick of the action at Andorra’s first summit finish with their leaders Juan Ayuso and João Almeida, with Ayuso putting in one stinging attack and both UAE riders finishing in the front group.
Evenepoel won, of course, but it cannot be doubted that UAE are going into the second big mountain stage of the Vuelta with high morale: Ayuso is currently running ninth at 38 seconds on Evenepoel, teammate Marc Soler is 10th at 42 seconds and Almeida is 11th at 42 seconds.
“We just have to take it step by step. What the main favourites do is something we can’t…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…