"No-one thought 'we need to stop to assist him'" - Tom Dumoulin bashes UAE's lack of action after Pogacar's Paris-Roubaix puncture

Paris-Roubaix is a chaotic race, but the riders are well aware of it. Hence in the moment Tadej Pogacar punctured with 120 kilometers to go, a defining period in the race, the lack of a teammate giving the World Champion a bike was quite a surprise for Tom Dumoulin who criticizes the Emirati team's errors in decision making during a time of urgency.

"I am totally amazed at how things went at UAE. Pogacar got a puncture at a very bad moment in the race twenty kilometers before the Trouée d'Arenberg," Dumoulin said in the NOS Cycling podcast. "The peloton was already split in two. It was already full-on racing. You know 'that is going to cause problems. They are riding at the front and he drops off'."

Chaos unfolded. It was a moment of bad luck, put simply. Pogacar suffered a mechanical at a time where the team car was nowhere to be seen, lost in the convoy behind the many groups that were split throughout the road, fruit of the race's chaotic nature. However, how it could've been different is if the Slovenian had received a bike from a teammate. "There is a teammate sitting on his wheel, mind you. They see that he has a puncture. He drops back through the peloton," he argues.

"At the back, there is another teammate, [António] Morgado. There are images and then you see Morgado looking at Pogacar like 'hey, there goes my team leader with his flat tire'. There were four teammates there, and no one thought 'we need to stop to assist him', or give him a wheel. No one shifted gears, and they stayed in the peloton."

Dumoulin was stunned with this situation. Pogacar lost time on the road, had a neutral bike that required switching once again - only after the team's car finally made it to him several minutes later - and the lack of radio access from the team's riders meant that he was isolated for a while before he was tracked down.

"That is obviously not ideal. He is then a minute behind the peloton. In no man's land. Riding hard at the front without teammates, who were strolling along in the first peloton. I found it very strange to watch." It is the nature of Roubaix. His natural ability saw him still making a comeback and finishing second in the race, but that is largely due to an endurance and wattage that other riders simply do not have in their arsenal.

But Dumoulin, a former pro at the top level, was left with a very bad impression of the team following Roubaix. "They have fantastic riders and they can dominate races, but the team management seems to lack ingenuity," he argues.

"If you look at how this went... Or Del Toro, who lost the Giro last year in a silly way. Then you see that in terms of tactics and strategy, Visma is five steps ahead. They simply made a mistake, because those riders should have just waited. You could have let Florian Vermeersch stay at the front, but the rest need to stop immediately and see what they can do".