Adam Yates on UAE Team Emirates move: These days you need your backup

Life begins at 30, they say, and as Adam Yates moves into his fourth decade and tenth pro season with a fresh start at UAE Team Emirates, he’s still not ruling out his options in the Grand Tour GC battles. And that’s despite having a team leader named Tadej Pogačar.

When Ineos Grenadiers announced their 2022 Tour de France, Yates was one of three riders with protected status together with Dani Martínez and Geraint Thomas. But in UAE Team Emirates, the presence of a double Tour de France winner like Pogačar makes that kind of egalitarian hierarchy virtually impossible, at least next July.

Either way, Yates says, his options as a Plan B for overall battles are not going to evaporate despite the much clearer GC structure in his new team.

“There’s one big superstar and after that a lot of young guys with a lot of potential and a lot of results. But you can’t just have one leader all the time,” Yates told a small group of reporters at the UAE team training camp this week.

“These days you need your backup, and who knows if somebody gets injured or sick and they need me to do something then I can step up.”

“Just because I changed teams doesn’t mean I’ve gone down a level, my levels are still the same,” Yates, ninth in this year’s Tour despite being battered by illness but whose best result on the books remains fourth overall in the 2016 race, says a fraction defensively.

“But there are a lot of good riders here. So, like in Ineos where we always went into the Grand Tours with two or three options because someone can get sick or injured, [maybe] get COVID. It’d be silly these days to invest that much money in riders and not have a second option.”

As for exactly where he could have options as top rider, Yates says he is not overly bothered. “I’m not fussy, it doesn’t matter what race, I’ve been like that all my life, I’ll get stuck in. And if the team ask me to help the other guys, I’ll do that and respect that, too.”

This is no exaggeration. In 2018, Yates formed part of the Mitchelton-Scott Vuelta a España team, mainly with the aim of being a force in the mountains that his brother Simon, en route to overall victory, could rely on in the third week. Fast forward four years and in the Tour de France this July, Yates was equally happy to support Thomas in the Pyrenees.

This begs the question as to why, if he knows how to play his cards and switch roles no matter the situation, Yates had moved on from Ineos at all. Indeed, he says that there were talks with the British squad about re-upping his contract during the year.

But he was drawn to UAE Team Emirates, he said, because when conversations opened up, “they already had a plan for me, and they knew what to do with me. For me that’s the most important thing, having a plan, knowing what they want from me and knowing that they will trust me and support me.

“We only spoke briefly at first. But from there, within a week of first talking, we sat down and started talking about contracts.”  As it was, they ended up agreeing on a relatively long three-year deal. The reason, as Yates puts it, was "I just said to the team, let’s settle down, make something happen and hopefully it’ll work out."

UAE with UAE

While there is clearly a very fluid level of communication between the rider and his new team, Yates remains cagey about what discussions there have been about his 2023 calendar. However, it seems very clear that he will be starting at the UAE Tour in February, a race he has won and twice finished second behind Pogačar.

“You can probably guess what the program is,” he said, “though to be honest I’m not that bothered about what they put me in. I’m happy to get stuck in wherever.

“Obviously I’d like to go to bigger races and try to show myself. But we’ll see, we’ve yet to sit down and confirm. I’d say it’s pretty clear from our conversations that I will start there at UAE. But after that, it’s yet to be settled.”

So UAE may be his third professional team, but with nearly a decade of top-level racing, Yates says he will be operating largely along the philosophy of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

“For some reason, I always go well at the start of the year. Even before that, there was a year when I went to Valencia and won a stage there [2019] and before that, I won a race in Italy [GP Industria & Artigianato, 2017 -Ed.] as my first race. It’d be silly to change that.”

He has no plans, either, Yates says, to change his off-season training program, given that he’s nearly always had such a good start to the year. “Even the coaches here said to me straightaway, ‘keep doing what you have been doing.’ I’m not young, so I know what I’m doing, I just need a nudge here or there to get the best out of me.”

He reiterates that while he has always been successful in one-week racing, his Grand Tour dreams are far from being quietly dropped. He likes racing too much for that, he says. “When you’re growing up as a young kid, you’re thinking about putting your arms in the air,” he says. “You’re not thinking about getting dropped. So I race 100 per cent, no matter the race.”

“Maybe I’ve not been going 100 per cent perfect in the Grand Tours. But when I’m at my best I’m among the best, and as long as I keep ticking the boxes, then the results will come.”

There have been some near misses along the way, he reasons. “Last year I had a lot of bad luck at key moments with illness,” with COVID-19 poleaxing him in the Tour de Suisse and that continued to affect him in the Tour, “so it could have been a lot better.”

“But look at Richie Porte. He never won a Grand Tour, but he won almost every stage race on the calendar. You can’t say he’s not one of the best stage racers in the world.”

Indeed, Yates’ two triumphs in his time at Ineos Grenadiers were both in week-long stage races, the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya in 2021 and then in 2022, the Deutschland Tour. The Volta is a race he knows very well, and his sheepish grin when asked if he’ll be doing Catalunya’s premier stage race (and Spain’s second biggest) again in 2023 strongly suggests it could be back on his calendar next March, too.

But in stark contrast, Yates went into the 2022 Deutschland Tour ‘blind’ and came away with an overall victory, too.

“I asked to do Germany even before seeing the profile, it was at the perfect time of year and it just happened to have a good mountain stage for me, one very similar to Jebel Hafeet,” Yates says, referring to the key mountain top in the UAE Tour where he’s always performed very well.

All of which goes to show, he concludes that whether it’s a Grand Tour or a minor stage race, “if there’s a calendar with races with the right profile at the right time, I can get a result. And assuming that happens with this team, then we can all have a lot of fun.”