Key Takeaways: UAE Tour Stages 1-2 & Clásica Jaén

Breaking down what we learned from our first few glimpses of the sport's top stars duking it out as the 2025 racing action heats up

With the 2025 road season picking up in intensity this week as nearly every major star takes the start line in one of the countless ongoing stage races (UAE Tour, Volta Algarve, Vuelta a Andalucía, Tour des Alpes-Maritimes), I wanted to take a moment to break down a few moments from the past few days of racing that stuck out to me as important before it is lost to the avalanche of upcoming racing. With three of the four best stage racers in the sport, Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, and Primož Roglič, all contesting difficult summit finishes in the coming days, there will be plenty of new action to break down and conclusions to come to by the end of the week.

Below is a collection of key takeaways from the opening two stages of the UAE Tour, where Tadej Pogačar has appeared to enter 2025 without missing a beat, and Jonathan Milan cements his status as the world’s top sprinter, along with how Ineos and UAE worked over a struggling Visma-Lease a Bike at the action-packed and innovative Clásica Jaén.

UAE Tour Stages 1 & 2

Stage 1
36.9km: Coming into the rolling dunes in the final kilometers of the opening stage, Tadej Pogačar comes to the front (showing off the UAE-owned new Colnago aero bike in the process) and puts the hammer down, likely in an attempt to shed the sprinters. Visma’s sprinter Olav Kooij is the first casualty.

35.8km: Pogačar’s effort strings the race out in a single-file line, and Pogačar slots into the first few wheels for the rest of the stage to stay out of trouble and conserve energy while his sprint rivals are forced to chase on.

350m: Pogačar, who has worked to stay at the front in the hectic finale, launches his sprint from extremely far out on the final uphill kilometer (average of around 5.5%).

300m: Lidl-Trek’s Jonathan Milan storms around Pogačar while Jasper Philipsen follows in the wheels, and a swarm of XDS-Astana riders scramble for positions in the top ten in order to maximize their points haul.

Finish: After a mammoth 20-second sprint, Milan crosses the finish line in first after Philipsen cracks and sits up before swerving into an aggrieved Finn Fisher-Black, who picks up a nice six-second time bonus after being promoted to second after Philipsen was relegated. Milan, despite weighing in at close to 90kgs, wins on an uphill finish where every other rider in the top ten weighed around 20kgs less, due to putting out a staggering average of 1,070 watts for the final 45 seconds.

Stage Top Three:
1) Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) +0
2) Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +0
3) Tobias Lund Andresen (Team Picnic PostNL) +0

Stage 2
Tadej Pogačar: The two-time winner of the race scorches his way through the flat 12km-long TT course, averaging an impressive 55.3km/hr (34mph) for the entire effort, which is slightly faster than his last two performances on this course.

Joshua Tarling: Despite turning in his best career performance on this course, Pogačar is denied the stage win when Ineos’ Tarling rips over the course 18 seconds faster, with a noticeably lower cadence than the rest of the field, to get Ineos’ first WorldTour win of the season.

Stage Top Three:
1) Joshua Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers) +0 (56.7 km/hr avg)
2) Stefan Bissegger (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team) +13
3) Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates - XRG) +18

Current GC Top Three:
1) Joshua Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers) +0
2) Stefan Bissegger (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team) +13
3) Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates - XRG) +18

Select Filtered GC Standings:
3) Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates - XRG) +18
4) Jay Vine (UAE Team Emirates - XRG) +21
5) Pablo Castrillo (Movistar) +27
6) Iván Romeo (Movistar) +28
7) Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +34
15) Lennert Van Eetvelt (Lotto) +46

Key Takeaways:

• Jonathan Milan’s Unique and Overpowering Physical Skills Have Him on the Verge of Becoming the World’s Top Sprinter: The 24-year-old Italian, who weighs in at 87 kilograms, appears to be on the verge of breaking out as the sport’s elite sprinter in 2025 thanks to his lethal combination of extremely high maximum power and an ability to more easily sustain a higher average power over a long period of time than his sprint rivals.

  • For example, on a 1km-long climb with a decently tough gradient of nearly 6%, Milan was able to arrive at the base of the climb with less fatigue due to his higher functional threshold power (how hard he can ride for an hour) and dust his much lighter competition due to his ability to sustain a near 30-second all-out sprint due to his ability to hold over 1,000 watts for as long as needed.

    • This ability to sustain extremely high power numbers for minutes on end comes from his time spent on the track, where he is the reigning World Champion in the individual Pursuit, which requires riders to ride as hard as possible for 4 kilometers.

  • While it now seems undeniable that Milan will be a force to be reckoned with in the sprints, I’m more curious about his potential in the upcoming one-day Classics.

    • With his Lidl-Trek team looking like the best team in the world at the moment, and his co-star Mads Pedersen also appearing in top form as he dropped his rivals at will to win the GC for a second straight year at the Tour de la Provence, the Pedersen/Milan duo could be a difficult force to contain in the coming weeks.

      • This was already partially on display at last year’s Gent-Wevelgem, where Milan and Pedersen’s teamwork foiled Mathieu van der Poel. But with Milan appearing to have improved over the off-season, this dynamic could cause even more significant problems for the top one-day superstars in 2025.

• Tadej Pogačar Hasn’t Missed a Beat: It won’t be what anyone else in pro cycling wants to hear, but through two days, Pogačar appears to be picking up in 2025, where he left off in his dominant 2024.

  • While the first two stages failed to feature much favorable terrain, he was within a timing error of winning the opening sprint and produced a devastating time trial performance on a pancake flat course that has his top GC rivals, like Finn Fisher-Black and Lennert van Eetvelt heading into Wednesday’s summit finish with 22-28 second deficits.

    • Pogačar has always performed well in this time trial, but it was still somewhat surprising to see him in such good form coming off such a successful year. It has only been two days, but Pogačar looks fit and focused enough that UAE will likely be able to avoid the crosswinds disasters and collapses on the climbs that saw them go from having three riders in the top three GC slots to failing to put a single rider inside the top ten in 2024.

      • Interestingly, the only other GC rider to come close to Pogačar on the stage was his teammate Jay Vine, who speaks well of UAE’s aerodynamic setup.

Clásica Jaén

70.3km-to-go: With a breakaway dangling up the road, UAE, which has impressive numbers at the front of the peloton, attempts to use its collection of strong riders to take control of the race on one of the many gravel sections.

66.4km-65.4km: Once back on the road, Ineos turns the tables by blowing up the group after sending Egan Bernal up the road, with Michał Kwiatkowski taking advantage of the chaos that follows when Bernal is reeled in by attacking and getting clear, with UAE’s Brandon McNulty following him and Visma missing out entirely.

45.4km: With the Kwiatkowski/McNulty group picking up Equipo Kern Pharma’s Ibon Ruiz from the early breakaway and holding a 40-second gap over the peloton, Visma’s Ben Tulett is forced to pull on the front. However, with his team leader, Wout van Aert, struggling at the back, Tulett is left exposed when UAE’s Tim Wellens follows an attack from Decathlon AG2R’s Jordan Labrosse and sets off in pursuit of the leaders.

44km: After Egan Bernal effortlessly bridges up to the chase group, Labrosse is left with two anchors on his wheel since UAE and Ineos want to protect their numerical advantage in the breakaway (it is debatable if this makes sense for UAE since McNulty will struggle to drop or outsprint Kwiatkowski. Behind, Wout van Aert, realizing he doesn’t have what it takes to win and that Tulett is stronger on the day, gets to the front to reel them in.

14.5km: UAE’s decision to play defense instead of getting more riders into the front group backfires when McNulty suffers a flat as Kwiatkowski/Ruiz ride clear.

12km: Kwiatkowski takes advantage of an uphill section to attack and drop Ruiz. On the same stretch of road, UAE’s Isaac del Toro, hearing that McNulty is out of the breakaway, attacks and leaves the peloton in pursuit of Kwiatkowski.

3.6km-Finish: Del Toro eventually reels in Ruiz but can’t catch Kwiatkowski, who holds a 30-second lead over the chasing duo through the final few kilometers to take a massive win.

Final Top Five:
1) Michał Kwiatkowski (Ineos Grenadiers) +0
2) Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) +31
3) Ibon Ruiz (Equipo Kern Pharma) +46
4) Jordan Labrosse (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) +1’53
5) Axel Laurance (INEOS Grenadiers) +1’53

Key Takeaways:

• Michal Kwiatkowski Once Again Punishes a UAE Team That Underestimated His Ability: While it was surprising to see the 34-year-old Michał Kwiatkowski take a win after a nearly two-year drought, it is fitting that it came in nearly the same manner as his last victory, which came on Stage 13 of the 2023 Tour de France when he held off a UAE-led chase after they failed to recognize the danger of letting him dangle off the front.

  • On top of the veteran’s win, the sight of his Ineos teammates shutting down moves behind showed just how strong the embattled team is riding at the moment (even if a late-race crash and collarbone break has Egan Bernal out for an extended period just as he was looking back to his best).

    • Combined with Tarling’s win at the UAE Tour, Ineos has solved its problem of being strong in races but struggling to convert that strength into victories, at least for now.

• UAE’s Overly-Defensive Tactics Shows How Their Stage Racing DNA Influences Their Decision-Making: It may seem obvious now, but the decision to mark out bridge attempts instead of allowing riders like Marc Soler and Tim Wellens to bridge up to the leaders when they were in groups that got within a few seconds of the leaders was a massive mistake at the time and speaks to UAE’s GC-obsessed ethos.

  • For example, while UAE approached the situation as binary and made the simple call that it is bad to bring rivals up to a front group where a teammate is present, this is a bit of stage race thinking, where a team of a GC up the road would never want to pull a GC rival into a front group, and success is sometimes about getting your leader to finish as close to the lead as possible without having an all-or-nothing view of winning.

    • However, the realities of one-day racing mean that decisions shouldn’t be about creating the greatest chance of winning in a simulation with a near-infinite sample size but simply isolating your fastest and/or strongest rider against the fewer possible contenders or, failing that, stacking the front group with the most possible riders in an attempt to muddy the waters for a faster/stronger competitor.

      • As a result of their defensive racing, UAE gained almost nothing by leaving McNulty isolated in a front group with a superior sprinter, Kwiatkowski, who was extremely unlikely to be dropped even if McNulty was on one of his best days.

        • So, instead of attempting to leverage having four strong riders (Wellens, Del Toro, Igor Arrieta, and Soler) in the chase group, they sat back and let Del Toro, who appeared strong and fast enough to win, fall so far behind Kwiatkowski that he wasn’t able to use his incredible form to attempt to win the race.

• Visma-Lease a Bike’s Disappointing 2025 European Debut Shows It Has a Long Way to Go Before Its Major Spring Goals: While it is important to remember that this was a fairly prestigious early-season race, seeing a star-studded Visma Lease bike team physically and tactically dominated by Ineos and UAE was still jarring.

  • Contrasted with the performances of Ineos’ Egan Bernal, who appeared to be floating between groups at will and waiting for Kwiatkowski to be reeled in to drop the rest of the peloton, it was somewhat jarring to see Visma’s Sepp Kuss, Tiesj Benoot and Wout van Aert constantly on the back foot before being dropped, as Ben Tulett, clearly their strongest rider, had to shift mid-race from domestique to leader.

    • We may be well over a month before the Tour of Flanders, but this can’t be how Visma-Lease a Bike wanted to kick off their 205 European season. Their unveiling shows just how far Wout van Aert has to go in roughly a month to be able to compete with other Classics contenders, like Mads Pedersen, Jonathan Milan, and, most importantly, Tadej Pogačar, who have clearly started the season at a much higher level and will have far less ground to make up before their key spring objectives.

      • In the past, it would have been easier to handwave away poor early-season form and say strong rivals have come into the season too sharp, but over the last few years, the form in which a rider takes into their first few races is where they tend to stay throughout the remainder of the season, as modern training and nutrition seems to have made it easier than ever to hold top form, which has made it harder than ever to recover from a down patch of fitness.

If you want to keep up with this week's packed racing schedule, check out my previous piece on how and where to watch pro cycling in 2025 (if not, keep an eye out for Friday’s premium-subscriber breakdown).