For a second day running, victory in the 2023 UAE Tour was decided by an agonisingly close margin as EF Education-EasyPost came within just one second of clinching a triumph in the team time trial, only to lose at the last possible moment.
If on Monday’s bunch sprint finish, Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep) and Caleb Ewan (Lotto-Dstny) were so close coming across the line, neither knew who had won, for much of Tuesday afternoon the battle for the top spot in the team time trial seemed equally uncertain.
But as team after team came perilously close to EF’s provisional best time yet failed to dislodge them, the smiles and grins along the line of pink-clad figures waiting in the hot seat podium chairs grew broader and broader.
Yet at the last possible moment, the final team to finish, Soudal-QuickStep, managed to topple EF’s time from atop the leaderboard. And in a question of seconds, the same pink-clad riders went from near-victory celebrations live on TV to making their way out of the side entrance to the podium area in dribs and drabs, before crossing a vast semi-empty car park to the waiting team cars.
Although disappointment at coming so close was obvious, the mood amongst the riders was one of quiet satisfaction at having given the rest of the field bar one a major run for their money.
“It’s a pity but while we were waiting for the other teams to finish, we were realistic, we always had the doubt at the back of our minds,” Andrey Amador told Cyclingnews as he walked across the car park.
“Many teams like Bahrain and Ineos were yet to come after we finished, though, maybe half in total.”
“Seeing how QuickStep were going in the last kilometre, we did begin to think we’d got a really good chance. But even if we lost by a second, this result gives us a lot of confidence to keep building for the future. That’s cycling.”
Considered one of the ‘motors’ for the EF squad in the TTT, Amador agreed that finishing second was a much better result than they had perhaps anticipated, “but that’s because we can be too pessimistic at times.”
“There were teams with lots of specialists and there are a lot of young riders in our team here. But Education First has always been a pioneer when it comes to team equipment, we’ve got a great time trial bike and our kits are really aerodynamic. These days, all those details truly add up and we showed we had some quality riders today.”
Speaking after EF Education-EasyPost had secured top spot overall but before they had finally been defeated, Amador’s teammate Simon Carr said that the key to their success had been a “really smooth ride all-round. It was actually really good fun - if hard.”
“My role was doing medium-length turns, we had other guys doing longer ones and one guy doing shorter. Then in the final, for myself and Lukasz [Wisniowski], our job was to do one big turn then pull off before the last headwind bit."
The rest of the guys finished it off pretty well And like I say, it felt really smooth.”
While some young riders like race leader Luke Plapp (Ineos Grenadiers) were able to draw on their team pursuit track experience, other relatively new pros like Carr were very inexperienced at team time trials as a pro. The Briton had only raced one TTT in the past, at Settimana Internazionale di Coppi e Bartali back in 2020 with his previous team Delko.
“That was a bit shorter, but pan-flat and on the coast. But I already noticed that compared with the amateurs, when you’re a pro the TTTs are really hard, it’s much more evenly matched” - as was the case at UAE. “At amateur level, if you’re strong, you’ve got a bit more ‘wriggle room’, and here, you can’t make a mistake, you’ll be dropped. But [at UAE] we were smooth.”
One factor that likely helped EF’s near faultless performance at UAE was, as Carr explained, that the team had practised their TTT efforts on three separate occasions to Tuesday, first at a team training camp in Spain, then again on arrival in the UAE and finally on the circuit itself on the morning of the race.
Once they hit ground zero and the course itself, they had a few surprises. “The biggest obstacles were the speed bumps, you could avoid a lot of them by going on the hard shoulder, but there were three you couldn’t. And one, on the tailwind bit, we were coming at almost 70 kilometres an hour!”
Such a high maximum speed, he said, was due to the strong breeze that, for a second day running, had a notable effect on the racing in very exposed terrain - on Monday a desert and coastline, on Tuesday, long access roads in and out of an enormous freighter port.
“There was almost full cross-tail at times so it was tough to get back on the wheel,” he explained, “but overall it was good.”
Regardless of the final result - at that point yet to be established - Carr agreed that the EF performance ‘definitely’ could be considered a good day out.
“I have no idea what final position we'll have, but we did as best as we could, and a top five would be good, there are some big teams here,” he said. And as things turned out, EF came within a whisker of doing far better than 'just' that.
