The 2023 UAE Tour has seen Remco Evenepoel take another step forward towards the Giro d'Italia, Luke Plapp claim a WorldTour podium for the first time, and Adam Yates net his first stage victory with UAE Team Emirates.
It also saw Mark Cavendish race with Astana Qazaqstan and with new lead-out man Cees Bol. Their journey together towards success at the Tour de France began in the Middle East.
Ten years Cavendish's junior, Bol grew up watching the Manxman win stage after stage of the Tour de France on television.
One he remembered in particular was "that iconic video on the Champs Elysées with Mark Renshaw leading him out in 2011 - I've watched that so many times," Bol told a small group of reporters, including Cyclingnews, before stage 7 of the UAE Tour.
While doing the same successful lead out for Cavendish this July would be a dream for Bol, right now, the two are still laying the foundations of their sprint lead-out.
"It's been going well, he's a nice guy," Bol said.
"Obviously he has a lot of experience and that's always good. It's always a bit hard in the beginning, especially in this race where it's super-difficult to get a good lead-out and we need to get used to each other at the same time. So it's been a challenging week but I think we have taken some good steps."
If the UAE Tour has been something of a baptism of fire for the pair, it's worth remembering the race had one of the highest-quality sprint fields of the season. The UAE Tour is dubbed the 'World Championships for sprinters.'
The combination of broad, flat roads and easy stages meant every rider was heading into the final kilometres fresh and at full tilt. That is hard for even the most experienced lead-out trains to deal with, judging by comments from sprint teams last week.
For a new combination, it is even more challenging.
Bol says they made a fair amount of progress on working together, although the only way to get an effective lead-out fully nailed down is working together at a lot of different races.
"You need racing. You can train for the physical effort you're making, but the chaos in the peloton, the timing and how to read a race is only something you can do in a race.
"During all my time as a pro I've always been leading out and sprinting myself, so I'm quite used to it. It's nice not to always have the same role in the team, too, and this year that's how it'll be, I guess."
Their results in the UAE Tour bore little relation to the work in progress behind the scenes.
Cavendish finished third on stage 1, with Bol in tenth, but that was at the end of a day of echelons. A puncture wrecking any chance of Cavendish repeating his 2022 triumph at the Abu Dhabi breakwater on stage 6, making stage 1 his best result.
Both riders know it will take time to build an effective working relationship, and they aren't expecting everything to snap into place in record time.
"Part of this is getting used to each other, me knowing what Cav wants in a certain race. Obviously, you can't talk that through at the precise moment of the sprint, so you have to talk about it, and learn about it, afterwards. In the same way, off the bike, you have to learn about his character, about what kind of sprints he likes, and about how he likes to approach certain aspects of it all."
While the question of how he works specifically with Cavendish is gradually being answered, Bol says that Cavendish's technical abilities have already helped him do his job.
"When you're leading out if you have to fit through a gap, you have to think 'will the guy I'm leading out' fit through it as well?" he explained.
"It's good because Cav' is really good at following my wheel. You can be pretty confident when I go somewhere a bit dicey, he'll follow anyway. It's very different to when you're only thinking for yourself and nobody is following."
Aside from getting to know Cavendish personally and discussing his strategies and approaches, Bol and Cavendish spend quite a bit of time looking at videos of previous bunch sprints on an upcoming finish. After the stage, they watch again to see what went well and what needs improving, and also what kind of strategies other teams are using.
Sprint analysis is a key part of working together.
"It's not too much like hard work," Bol points out, "I like cycling so I like watching bike races."
Having raced together once in the UAE Tour, Bol says there are various building blocks now needed to be put in place in the next phase, given Astana Qazaqstan is not a team with a big tradition in bunch sprints.
"It's a bit about coaching the guys in front of us, to make sure they get us where we need to be in the last kilometre. I think that's the biggest thing we have to do now."
However, lessons learned in the past about the right kind of lead-out may not be that applicable to the present. The way sprints are structured nowadays are different, Bol says because rather than a few teams specialising in them, now quite a few want in.
"I think there are more sprint trains than before, and that means the range [of opportunity] for doing a lead-out well - on questions like your timing, not being too early but not being too late - is narrower."
"Sprinting has changed so much now. However, there are a few guys who are up there in the sprints nine times out of ten. And that's impressive."
He reels off some of the top lead-out names.
"[Michael] Mørkøv (Soudal-QuickStep) is a good example, [Ramon] Sinkeldam (Alpecin-Deceuninck, Renshaw…"
If Bol can help Cavendish win this year, ands especially at the Tour de France, he will join that list of successful and admired leadout riders.
