One is a former Volta a Catalunya winner, the other has one of the best track records of victories this spring. So it's no small wonder that as the Volta a Catalunya heads into the high mountains on Wednesday, UAE Team Emirates-XRG are intent on using both Adam Yates and Juan Ayuso as joint GC candidates.
Ayuso, having picked up a three-second time bonus on stage 2, is currently lying fifth overall, 13 seconds down on race leader Matthew Brennan (Jumbo-Lease a Bike). Yates was caught on the wrong side of a late split on the rain-soaked finale to stage 1. But he remains in contention, just 18 seconds further back and 31 down on the race leader on GC. Both have more than enough experience to justify their status, with Yates the overall winner of Volta a Catalunya four years ago at the head of a three-rider Grand Slam for his then team, Ineos Grenadiers.
"Adam is getting there and steadily improving, as he always does, and Juan is in a formidably good condition. The truth is the situation is good for both of them," team manager Joxean Fernández Matxin told Cyclingnews at the stage 2 start in Banyoles.
"When Tadej [Pogačar] is racing, obviously he's the sole leader for us. But here Juan is clearly a leader here because of his condition, and Adam's co-leader as well."
"I think the way cycling is raced these days, it's important for a team to have various top names, not just one, as contenders."
Rather than letting Yates and Ayuso's performances at the Volta's first summit finish at la Molina on stage 3 decide the UAE GC hierarchy for the race - the classic 'the road will decide' philosophy for many teams' dilemmas about race leadership - Matxin said, "That's not the way we ever look at that in UAE. It's not even discussed like that.
"If Adam has a chance, he'll take it, and if Juan has that chance, he'll take it too. But the leader here, and always, is UAE Team Emirates."
Outside Catalunya, Matxin underlined there was still no news yet on Pogačar's potential participation in Paris-Roubaix, rolling out the now-familiar line that the decision would be communicated by the team's media department when it was felt to be best.
Rather than the flat plains and cobblestones of northern France, in any case, WorldTour cycling is currently focussed on the first incursion of the 2025 peloton into the Pyrenees, on Wednesday in the Volta a Catalunya. It's an exceptionally hard 220 kilometres of racing with more than 5,000 metres of vertical climbing, much of it possibly in freezing cold weather on the higher slopes, and with a mountain top finish at La Molina to round it off.
That tougher-than-usual format to the La Molina stage - one of the Volta's most frequently used summit finishes, visited eight times in the last 11 years - will have its effect on the stage, Matxin argued. Rather than the usual cliché of a first mountain stage showing who will lose the race but not who will win it, Matxin said that with so much hard racing in store before the final climb, 'this time around, it's a more a little bit of both.'
Combined with the previous ascents, including the Hors Categorie Col de la Creuta, "La Molina is a climb that's difficult enough to ensure that whoever's ahead is definitely in a position to go for the victory overall, and it'll also show who's not up to that GC challenge as well."
"Being so hard beforehand could change the way the stage is raced, as well. Any climbers who have lost time already, like Felix Gall (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) or Valentin Paret-Peintre (Soudal-QuickStep), guys who have nothing to lose and a lot to win - it could become a good opportunity for them."
For all of the peloton, the year's first Pyrenean stage of any race is always something of a voyage in the dark. Not even Monday's challenging opening stage of the Volta, which usually already provides some hints about who is in top form, has cast any early light on that early season uncertainty this year, Matxin argued.
"Monday wasn't an exceptionally dangerous or technical stage, rather the fact that we were on the coast and it rained really hard made it a very special stage, purely because of the weather," Matxin told Cyclingnews - and one from which it was impossible to draw any conclusions about who was likely to be going for it in the mountains.
What is certain, in any case, is that Ayuso is in great form, having won three of his four races so far this year, including Tirreno-Adriatico, Matxin said. But by all accounts, Yates is also ready for a big mountain fight.
"Catalunya is an objective, after France and Italy. These are all the races he'll be doing before going to altitude and getting ready for the Giro d'Italia. Adam was sick in Tirreno, and not at 100%, but he's coming back into it now, and hitting that top form again. He's on his way, too."
