Just because the road is smooth and pancake flat doesn’t ensure your place in a bunch finish, Sam Bennett among those caught out not so much by tactics but crosswinds during some hectic racing on the opening stage of the UAE Tour.
As the first UCI World Tour of the new season it was a nervy day too, some riders overly cautious perhaps as the race was split early on in the 176km from Al Dhafra into the coastal city of Al Mirfa, the conditions playing a part from there: a group 26 riders got away with 111km still to go, and stayed away, before Mathieu van der Poel sprinted off the front of that reduced bunch to take the win and an early race lead.
For the 26 year-old Dutch rider, only back on the road after winning his fourth World Cyclo-cross title in six years in Ostend in Belgium three weeks ago, it was also his first bunch sprint triumph at UCI World Tour level.
Part of the problem for Bennett was that five of his Deceuninck-QuickStep team mates were also in that breakaway group, including João Almeida, who won the first intermediate sprint, just before the peloton broke up again for good.
For a while the riders were spread out in clean echelons as if in an air show, the reality for Bennett being he was in a sort of no-man’s land: in the end he finished in the second group that came home eight minutes and 39 seconds behind, most of that gap coming over the last 20km.
Best of his Deceuninck-QuickStep team mate’s was Michael Morkov, so often Bennett’s lead out rider, who finished third: van der Poel admitted afterwards the crosswinds had a major bearing on the stage, and he certainly hadn’t expected to find himself in a winning position.
Riding at 51.9km per hour for the opening hour of racing, what was marked down as a somewhat predictable stage turned out to be the exact opposite; Monday’s Stage 2 is a 13km time trial, before Bennett gets three more chances of making a likely bunch sprint finish on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday’s final stage into Abu Dhabi Breakwater. Bennett won the final stage in 2019 into Dubai Safari Park, also finishing fourth on Stage 5 that year.
Van der Poel now has a four second advantage in the general classification ahead of fellow Dutch rider David Dekker from Team Jumbo-Visma, with Tour de France champion Tadej Pogacar, still only 21, of local UAE Team Emirates, also starting will to finish sixth on the stage.
“Very windy, and a very hard race,” van der Poel said. “I had good legs from beginning after at the intermediate sprint a got into the big group went away. I knew I could finish it off in the sprint but didn’t expect to win it all. I knew my sprint gets better and better when it is hard and that I had to be in the right position. It’s real nice to start my road season with a win.”
