The day of June 26, 2021 is not just another day in the history of UAE Team Emirates. It is the date of the start of the defense, of the race against the elements that is laid out in the team's path in the pursuit of its second Tour de France.
"Now comes the hardest part, to hold on." said Joxean Fernández Matxin at the start of the campaign. The moment has arrived.
Matxin knows the structure of UAE Team Emirates from kilometer zero of a project that was born with the vocation of being the powerful team it is today.. If the 26th of the current is a special day for the UAE Team Emirates family, no less so was that of January 4, 2017, when at a press conference in Adu Dhabi the team's first racing plan was announced.
Those were the first moments of the UAE banner in the world peloton: 29 cyclists of multiple nationalitiesThe first of these was the first time that UAE's flagship team in the world peloton: 29 cyclists of many nationalities, although with a strong Italian accent - not in vain they were picking up the baton from the legendary Lampre - set off on their journey.
Nineteen UAE victories
They fell on the side of that powerful structure, with another important date, engraved in fire, that of January 27 of that same year, when Rui Costa won alone in the Alto Colorado of the Vuelta a San Juan. A few days later, the same Portuguese rider would be the winner of the Abu Dhabi Tour, the country's race, the germ of today's UAE Tour. That week it was announced that Emirates would become a co-sponsor of the squad.
It was the beginning of an idyll with the triumph that had another remarkable high point with Jan Polanc, one of the structure's historic riders.winning the fourth stage of the Giro, his debut in the grand tours. That was on Etna, on May 9, no less.
The leap in quality for the team was signed in 2018,
With the entry of two cyclists of the quality of Daniel Martin and Alexander Kristoff. A prize of riders that paid off immediately, already at the Tour de France. On July 12, the Irishman won an uphill sprint over Pierre Latour and Alejandro Valverde on the crest of the Mûr de Bretagne. A few days later, in Paris, Kristoff was on target at the most coveted finish of the year.
Two Tour victories were a leap in quality.
2019, enter Tadej Pogačar
The 2019 campaign is the explosion. Already at the Tour Down Under, Jasper Philipsen opens an account that by the end of the year would be close to thirty victories.. The Belgian was followed by Fernando Gaviria and Juan Sebastián Molano, in Argentina and Colombia, before a chubby Slovenian kid, winner of the Tour de l'Avenir a year earlier, took his second professional career with a victory.
Tadej Pogačar arrived alone at the Alto de Pola with one second over Wouter Poels and three ahead of Enric Mas. We were in the Volta Algarve, it was February 21, and cycling was witnessing not only the partial triumph, but also the handling of the overall by a 21-year-old kid.
The prodigy grew up fast, in the midst of a team that accumulated victories in every race in which he took part. Of particular significance was the Ghent-Wevelgem, which Kristoff won in an imperial sprint after 260 kilometers of unbridled competition. The account grew and grew, and Pogačar actively contributed to it: stage and overall of the Tour of California, the last in history, and three stages in the Vuelta a España..
Thus the very rare twenty-twentieth campaign, with all the competition displaced from August onwards due to the ravages of the pandemic, ended with one of the great successes of modern cycling.Tadej Pogačar's victory in the time trial of La Planche des Belles Filles and thus of the overall of the Tour, a prize that in cycling means reaching the top, even at the age of 22.
The Slovenian sentenced the Tour de France on September 19by then, they say, the entry of Gobik UAE Team Emirates was well underway.In any case, that September afternoon, at the gates of autumn, gives him every reason to think that June 26, 2021 is another of the team's big dates: the defense of the Tour de France begins.
PhotosBettiniPhoto / Fizza Photo
