UAE EMIRATES JOINS THE SUPERTEAMS
The men’s WorldTour is officially a 19-team division. However, there’s a hierarchy, and you could roughly divide the teams into three categories - the superteams at the top, strugglers at the bottom, and everybody else in between. Through 2020, the superteams were the Ineos Grenadiers, Jumbo-Visma and Deceuninck-Quick Step. Ineos’s budget, roster and record in the Tour de France in the last few years guaranteed them a place at the top, while Jumbo-Visma have built a team over several seasons which can now match Ineos in the grand tours. Jumbo-Visma also have a monument winner in Wout van Aert. Deceuninck have won more races than any other team, year in, year out - the last time they did not end the season with more wins than any other team was 2012, which is an astonishing record, and they’ve been particularly dominant in one-day racing.
But as 2021 begins, it looks like UAE Emirates are joining these three teams as the dominant forces in the men’s WorldTour. They won the Tour de France with Tadej Pogacar and though they were happy to sit back and let Jumbo-Visma make the running in that event, partly out of choice, partly out of necessity, they’ve slowly built a formidable support crew for the Slovenian in the grand tours. They are covered in the cobbled classics by perennial contender and former Tour of Flanders winner Alexander Kristoff, in the sprints by Fernando Gaviria, if he re-finds his former speed, and in the hilly classics by surprise new signing Marc Hirschi, who came close in both Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the World Championships last year.
UAE have one of the biggest budgets in cycling, and are throwing a lot of money at building a very strong team. They’ve hired respected staff, like manager Allan Peiper, and though they’ve had to buy established riders out of necessity, they’ve prioritised signing youth - they got Pogacar straight out of the U23 ranks.
When UAE took over Lampre’s infrastructure and WorldTour licence in 2017, the Italian team had finished outside the top 10 teams for eight consecutive years according to the Procyclingstats.com ranking system. Since then, they’ve finished the year in 12th, 15th, sixth and third place, and wins in the last three years have gone from 12 in 2018 through 30 in 2019 to 33 last year, despite the truncated calendar. Not every follower of cycling is a fan of the human rights record of the UAE, as reported by Amnesty International, or of the oil money that has bought them such strength. But on a sporting level, UAE Team Emirates are now among the very strongest teams in the world.