Roglič sets out Jumbo statement
When the organisers of the Dubai and Abu Dhabi Tours confirmed last year they were to merge the two races in 2019 into a new seven-stage UAE Tour, the aim was to cherry pick the best of both worlds to create a “bigger impact”. The parcours was made up of two flat stages, two rolling days, two summit finishes and a team time trial, with Dubai’s finish at Hatta Dam and Abu Dhabi’s summit at Jebel Hafeet both key stages. Such a rounded route ensured the race would continue to attract as star-studded a line up as its predecessors did, with almost every one of the current top sprinters in attendance plus a host of GC riders, including Tom Dumoulin, Vincenzo Nibali, Alejandro Valverde, Dan Martin and Primo Roglic. The UAE Tour had all the ingredients of the big race organisers were after, yet perhaps they hadn’t banked on the GC classification being essentially sewn up on the day-one opening TTT. Primo Roglic’s Jumbo-Visma won the 16km test against the clock, where the Slovenian took the leader’s red jersey by seven seconds, and he never relinquished it throughout the entire week.
Roglic has quickly ascended to become one of the peloton’s top stage racers. His win here was his fifth stage race win since the start of 2017, and means he has only finished outside the top six on GC once since the start of 2018 – at Tirreno-Adriatico when he lost time after being held up behind a crash. The team has been credited with making canny, but not showy, investments in riders in recent years, and two of their newest signings - Tony Martin and Laurens De Plus - proved another clear masterstroke in the UAE as JumboVisma continue to emerge as a rounded stage racing force.
The TTT has been an area Jumbo Visma has put much effort into improving – the stage 1 win was only their second TTT victory since 2011. The addition of Tony Martin to their line-up, alongside TT specialists Roglic and Jos Van Emden, brought in more of the firepower that’s been much-needed as they edged to the win. Belgian De Plus, meanwhile, earned the team’s MVP award when the UAE Tour hit the race’s crucial climbs on stages 3 and 6. The 23-year-old joined from Quick-Step this winter, and set such a fast pace on the front of the peloton, on the summit finishes of Jebel Hafeet and Jebel Jais, that he shed many of the team’s GC rivals and set up Roglic’s two stage wins where he extended his lead.
Where the UAE Tour posed even more questions was in its sprints. For the last few years, the Dubai and Abu Dhabi Tours have typically been the only races before the Tour de France where you can see all of the top sprinters go head-to-head and the UAE Tour appeared to carry on this mantle with Elia Viviani, Fernando Gaviria, Caleb Ewan and Marcel Kittel among the plethora of sprinters here – indeed, the only
noticeable absentee was Roglic’s team-mate Dylan Groenewegen. Signs have pointed to this season’s sprint contests being closer than ever, as the gap between the top crop of fast men narrows and the ‘new generation’ start hitting their prime. Indeed, no one sprinter dominated, with the spoils evenly shared across the week. Gaviria won stage 2; Ewan stage 4 (albeit on an uphill finish to Hatta Dam), Viviani stage 5; and
Sam Bennett stage 7.
However, it’s likely the UAE Tour’s biggest impact will yet be seen at the grand tours in a few months’ time, when the riders all come together against each other again.
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