From concussion to backing Pogacar’s Tour de France win in two months - UAE’s veteran Briton continues to deliver

Adam Yates did not win a stage at the 2026 Tour de France, did not wear a jersey and finished 21st overall. Even so, when Tadej Pogacar broke the Alpe d’Huez record in yellow, Yates was one of the riders he thanked afterwards. The Briton had spent the previous days barely able to eat or finish stages.

Eight weeks before that, Yates had left the Giro d’Italia with a cut ear and delayed concussion symptoms after a mass crash in Bulgaria. He had arrived in Italy as one of UAE’s leaders, and his race lasted two days.

He did not race again between the Giro and the Tour, and by early July he was on the start line in Barcelona, named in the eight-man team built around Pogacar’s fifth yellow jersey.

That route from a roadside concussion check to the Champs-Élysées fits what UAE have come to expect from him. At 34, Yates has been Pogacar’s regular mountain lieutenant since 2023, and he is signed with the team until the end of 2028. He is rarely the name on the front pages, but he has been present in the rider’s best Tours.

In 2026 Pogacar won the Tour with five stage wins, and Yates was one of the teammates who made that possible, in a season that looked lost for him at the beginning of May.

Yates was born in Bury in 1992 and turned professional in 2014 with Orica-GreenEDGE, the Australian team where his twin brother Simon also rode. His first professional race was the Tour de San Luis, where he finished 11th overall and won the young rider classification. In his first season he also won the Tour of Turkey and the GP Industria & Artigianato, a race he would win again in 2017.

The following years brought bigger results. He won the Clasica San Sebastian in 2015, and in 2016 he finished fourth at the Tour de France and won the white jersey for the best young rider. He stayed with the Australian team, later named Mitchelton, for seven seasons. In 2020 he won the UAE Tour after taking stage 3 on Jebel Hafeet by more than a minute, a climb that would later become familiar to him as a UAE rider.

In 2021 he moved to INEOS, where he won the Volta a Catalunya that year and the Deutschland Tour in 2022. At the UAE Tour in 2022 he was second overall, 22 seconds behind Pogacar, who beat him on the final climb of Jebel Hafeet. It was the same rider he would work for at the end of that year, when he moved to UAE.

The 2023 season was arguably the best of his career. He started it with a stage win on Jebel Hafeet and third place overall at the UAE Tour, then won the Tour de Romandie and finished second at the Criterium du Dauphine. At the Tour he won stage 1 in Bilbao, took the yellow jersey and ended third overall behind Jonas Vingegaard and Pogacar. He closed the year with a win at the Grand Prix de Montreal.

In 2024 he won the Tour of Oman, including stage 5 on Jebel Akhdar, and then the Tour de Suisse, with two stage wins and the points and mountains jerseys. He rode the Tour de France as support for Pogacar, alongside Joao Almeida, and finished sixth overall while the Slovenian won. In August he added stage 9 of the Vuelta in Granada with a solo attack.

His 2025 started with a second consecutive Tour of Oman. At the Giro he finished 12th while working for Isaac del Toro, and then he helped Pogacar win the Tour again. He said later that he was short of his best that summer because he had “put myself in a hole” by doing too much early in the season, and he decided to go for the Giro and Tour again in 2026 with a more careful approach.

In those three years his role was the same one. He is a high-level climber who can win a one-week stage race when he has freedom, and who stays with Pogacar deep into the mountain stages when he does not. That combination is why UAE signed him through 2028.

Yates did not win in the first months of 2026, but his form improved in April. At O Gran Camiño he won stage 4 with an attack 3.8 kilometres from the top of the Alto de Cabeza de Meda, finishing 46 seconds ahead of Jorgen Nordhagen and taking the leader’s jersey. It was his first win of the season and his first lead in a stage race since winning Oman a year earlier. “It was a great day… but also very hard”, he said afterwards.

He defended the lead on the last stage, another summit finish at Monte Trega, and won the race ahead of Nordhagen, Visma’s young Norwegian. Three weeks later he went to the Giro as one of UAE’s main options for the general classification, after Almeida had withdrawn before the start with a virus.

The race opened in Bulgaria. On stage 2, around 30 riders crashed on a slippery descent with 23 kilometres to go. UAE were the team most affected: Jay Vine and Marc Soler abandoned straight away, and Jhonatan Narvaez and Antonio Morgado also went down. Yates got back on his bike, bloodied and covered in mud, and finished 170th, 13:46 behind the front group.

He started the next morning with his GC hopes already gone, but the team doctor Adrian Rotunno announced that he would not take the start of stage 3. Yates had abrasions and a laceration to his left ear, and after being cleared at the roadside he later developed “delayed concussive symptoms”. Team manager Mauro Gianetti said the team lost him “when he was in great form”.

UAE kept racing with five riders and won four stages, three with Narvaez and one with Igor Arrieta. Yates, meanwhile, started his recovery and did not race again until the Tour.

UAE announced the Tour squad at the end of June: Pogacar, del Toro, Yates, Nils Politt, Florian Vermeersch, Tim Wellens, Felix Grossschartner and Brandon McNulty. Yates was starting his tenth Tour, and his role was the one he already knew: stay with Pogacar in the mountains and be useful in the key moments.

The first week went well for the team. Pogacar won stages 3 and 6, the second one by a large margin, and Yates spoke afterwards about his leader’s approach. “He doesn’t know any different”, he said. At the Tour he moved up the standings quietly. After stage 10 he was 20th overall, and on stage 15, the first of the Alpine stages, he finished ninth and moved up to 14th.

Then he got sick with a stomach problem. In the stage 16 time trial he finished 85th, and the next day he lost contact with the peloton on the way to Voiron. Wellens helped him reach the finish within the time limit, 162nd on the day. “He really suffered a lot”, Pogacar said that evening.

His recovery came on stage 19, from Gap to Alpe d’Huez. Yates said he was near the front marking attacks when a gap opened, and he ended up in the 42-rider breakaway. When Pogacar attacked from the group of favourites, he caught Yates halfway up the climb, and the Briton gave him a pull before the race leader continued chasing the escapees. Pogacar said “Adam gave me a good moral boost” and went on to win the stage with a new record on the climb.

Yates himself was careful afterwards. “Reborn is a strong word”, he said, explaining that he was still suffering and that even finishing stages had been hard. Another quote summed up how he felt: “It’s good to be back.” He was 37th on the next day’s stage to Alpe d’Huez, and on the final stage in Paris he was at the front of the peloton when the race entered its last lap. He finished the Tour 21st overall.

Yates raced again in September and October. He was 13th at the Grand Prix de Montreal, which del Toro won, and eighth at the Giro dell’Emilia, so the illness at the Tour left no lasting damage. Pogacar’s season ended early after his crash on stage 8 of the Vuelta, but the Tour had already given UAE their most important result of the year.

His results in 2026 were small by his own standards: one stage race, a Tour in support and a Giro that lasted two days. But the numbers hide his value to the team. Since 2023 he has combined a few wins of his own each year with the role that matters most to UAE, which is being in the right place when Pogacar needs a teammate in the mountains.

With a contract until the end of 2028, he will be 36 when it expires, and nothing in his season suggests UAE will regret it.