PREVIEW | UAE Tour 2025 stage 1 - Can Pogacar win uphill sprint against Milan, Merlier, Philipsen and others?
Cycling
From February 17th to 23rd, the UAE Tour 2025 will take place. It is the second World Tour stage-race of the year and will feature plenty of stars in the field of the sprinters and also climbers - headlined by Tadej Pogacar. We preview stage 1.
The first stage of the race is a full-on ride through the desert, much of the stage in a literal straight line, where strong winds could create absolute chaos. To be fair on the riders, there will only be 137 kilometers of racing, but I doubt there will be many excited to tackle on such a route.
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The finale however will be slightly uphill in Liwa, giving way to an exciting first sprint for the race lead. It's not an easy one, and the battles for leadout won't be so ferocious in the final kilometer, but instead into the final corner with over 1.5 kilometers to go. From there on, pure power will matter, but form and sustained power will be just as important.
The Weather
A lot of heat, 30 degrees in the desert and the wind won't really blow. There will be a small southern breeze, meaning a long block headwind throughout most of the day... The sprint could have a crosswind but it won't be strong enough to make much of an effect.
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The Favourites
Tadej Pogacar - Can he? Logic would say no, but how many times have we been proven wrong in the past. With 2025 starting the safe bet is to actually never say Pogacar's "can't surely do that right?" Yes he can. The sprint won't be steep so definitely it will be a big challenge, but if he starts in good position then he can potentially go and grab some bonifications or even more.
Tim Merlier - Merlier is the rider who traditionally thrives on the opening day of any race when there is a sprint involved. He won the opening stage of the last two editions and not just that, the uphill sprint suits him. The Belgian is a rider that will be licking his lips, and although he may not have a luxury leadout as some of his rivals, he knows how to do it himself and can very well go on and win for the third time this year.
Jonathan Milan - The form Milan showed at the Volta a Comunitat Valenciana was impressive. When it comes to pure speed and leadout the Italian is fully covered, but going uphill he is also looking very good and having a win for Lidl-Trek here would be no surprise whatsoever.
Jasper Philipsen - Philipsen is a very strong sprinter who also loves the uphill finishes, but he won't be above the competition here I assume. At the same time, there is no argument against the Alpecin-Deceuninck rider, who will have a full team dedicated to chasing wins on the flat days including this one.
This is the sprinter's race and there will be a whole array of fast men wanting to have a strong result or even win throughout the week. Some of these will enjoy the slightly uphill finish whilst others not so much and can benefit more from the chaos of the flat finales. Visma's Olav Kooij will certainly have this as a priority this week, having a leader's jersey available but also the sprint will be hard and better suited to his abilities. The likes of Tobias Lund Andresen, Lionel Taminiaux and Ide Schelling are also going to look forward to a finale that is as hard as possible to as to improve their chances of a top result.
In the more pure sprinter field we've got actually quite a lot of riders, who won't enjoy this finale as much likely. It will require a longer and more constant effort that will drain some of the pure power. Some sprinters like Fabio Jakobsen, Dylan Groenewegen and Sam Welsford certainly have the watts but this effort may put them on a major disadvantage.
Arvid de Kleijn, Phil Bauhaus, Gerben Thijssen, Juan Sebastián Molano and Fernando Gaviria will all be interesting outsiders, whilst we can also consider the likes of Matteo Malucelli or Oded Kogut for a Top10 result.
Prediction UAE Tour 2025 stage 1:
*** Tim Merlier, Jonathan Milan
** Jasper Philipsen, Olav Kooij
* Tadej Pogacar, Tobias Lund Andresen, Dylan Groenewegen, Sam Welsford, Arvid de Kleijn, Phil Bauhaus, Juan Sebastián Molano, Fernando Gaviria
Pick: Tim Merlier
How: Regular bunch sprint.
Original: Rúben Silva
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The UAE Tour is now just days away, we sat down with some of the riders taking part to get their thoughts 💭 #UAETour @AbuDhabiSC@ihc__official@Mubadala@NakheelOfficial@aldar pic.twitter.com/m0S4ki4ob8
— UAE Tour Official (@uae_tour) February 13, 2025
I love the crazyness of Tadej, how he loves and enjoy to try new challenges but I'm afraid he might get hurt: there are a lot of more interesting races throughout the year. Be careful! please, no sprint, no lead out, only GC.
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- i wouldn't count Pogi out. Low probability of a win, but not impossiblemobk01-04-2025
- Right now it doesn't seem that his legs are there or that his head is in the racevappaxbipmv01-04-2025
- would have been nice to hear exactly WHY he thinks pog has zero chance in some greater detail. i mean, tend to agree that his chances aren’t GREAT, but some explanation from the expert with an opinion would be nice. MINE is that, in spite of the recon he did where tadej concluded that the course “wasn’t that hard” i think that doing the full route at full gas is really going to beat up pogacar’s 145lb body, to a degree that he maybe isn’t expecting. but hey, we’ll see in a couple weeks. like everyone else, i do think it’s supercool that he’s going.OCexile01-04-2025
- Go back to that era and look at the lousy mechanicals he's had at Paris-Roubaix. Take those away, maybe he has another Monument, Van der Poel has one less, and suddenly all the rules change. Those mechanicals preceded his awful crashes - and you're right, that Tour was amazing. Ventoux, TT, and Champs-Elysees?! Something that Pogacar and Van der Poel can't do, just Wout. It still amazes me.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Oh, the impossibility of this kind of comparison. A pre-WW2 Binda had amazing statistics, and that was one era. During what I think of as the romantic era, Poulidor had an incredible run at the Tour without winning, and Bobet won some grand tours and some Monuments. In this modern era (for me: after Hinault), we've had multiple Monument winners win a grand tour (such as Valverde and Kelly, with Kelly the better rider in general), and then we've got someone like Roglic, the true GC rider. Sure there was a Monument that was kind of a fluke (both Pogacar and Hirschi might have won, and twitchy Alaphilippe deserved relegation), but what matters are the 5 grand tours and all these wins across the 1 week GC races except for the Tour de Suisse (you'd think he'd race it to get the set of them all). In this era, since 2000 or so, maybe he meets the description as best non-Tour winner. How many GC riders have these wins and not the Tour? To compare to other eras really is not possible. He's his own unique rider, and it's been amazing watching him for the past many years. That's about all we can say.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Ease up on a brother!bobo01-04-2025
- Primoz finds ways to win. Too bad he'll never take Tour de France.awp01-04-2025
- I don't think I would ever count Wout van Aert out of a race if his head is in it. He is a serious talent.awp01-04-2025
- He's a great rider for sure, not sure if he the best to never win the Tour though.awp01-04-2025
- Hard to imagine that his confidence - that imperious flow state that great athletes operate in - hasn't been affected. But that is a different dynamic than the one you described. He has not become hesitant because he is fixated on his rival. He has suffered multiple traumatic injuries, and I have no doubt he is still 1% off both mentally and physically as a result. Football (both kinds) and basketball players who blow out knees go through a predictable cycle in which they are reluctant to do max efforts even after their doctors have cleared them. I myself went though a small version of that after a back injury. It's just hard once you no longer know where the line is. We saw in his TT a couple weeks ago that he still has power, and for all the hand wringing he is still finishing in the top 10-20 of big races. But as we have seen with others, getting *all* the way back is not assured. I'm not ready to say he is done, but few riders who have been hurt as often and as badly as him remain at the top.MidnightRider01-04-2025