Abu Dhabi, February 24th 2019 – The inaugural 7 stage Tour of UAE started with 16km TTT at the Al Hudayriat Island. It was a fast flat course on completely deserted island with only 2 U-turns around 3km mark. Temperature was in mid 20s, with no wind. This is also the first time our team wore jerseys with team name in Arabic, which we’ll continue to wear throughout the whole Tour.
It was a great team effort where we could see everyone working on the head of the train and taking the curves and U-turns to perfection. We finished as 1st at that moment, with 10 teams to go, and Team Jumbo Visma that started right after us took over first place for 9 seconds. To the end of the race only Team Sunweb passed us for mare 2 seconds, making us 3rd ranked team for the day. This is a really good start for us and it will only boost our confidence for the hard days to come.
David Bailey, our Head of Performance – “It was really good execution. It has been a lot to learn in last few months, but the guys have been really engaged and motivated, and we had a good first race on here. A lots to be built on, and lots to be pleased about. Everyone rode really well, and it’s great starting point for us to continue to improve. The main word of this race was team, and that was the main focus here, to ride as a team and think of your teammates, and everything we spoke about before the race, the guys did in the race, they rode well together, and when guys dropped they communicated this.”
“It was hard” – were the first words Rohan Dennis said after the race – “it was a good start for us at the UAE Tour and for our first team time trial as a team, and most of us are new in the team, so it is a really really good start. It was an even effort, we timed it to perfection, couple guys did last pull in last 3km, gave everything they could and get us across the finish line.”
