UAE Tour: Tadej Pogacar wins sprint atop Jebel Jais and takes over race lead

The UAE Team Emirates rider confirmed the expectations put on him by winning the UAE Tour's fourth stage atop Jebel Jais in a reduced bunch sprint, despite an attacked climb. Tadej Pogacar is also the new race leader.

Despite being the most mountainous day of the race, it was never a day where a breakaway could succeed as the terrain is favourable for a peloton to chase. Two riders braved up and made the break of the day with Jakob Egholm (Trek-Segafredo) and Luca Rastelli (Bardiani-CSF-Faizanè) taking up the responsability, heading the race throughout most of the day until the bottom of the final climb.

With it's shallow gradients of 5-6% throughout most of the ascent, it would always be hard to create gaps. EF made the chase through the day and reeled the breakaway in, before UAE Team Emirates started to pace with George Bennett thinning down the group. Halfway up the climb Tadej Pogacar made a move, but to set up for an attack from his teammates as a flurry of moves set up, with Rafal Majka heading some, but all of them reeled back in by the work of INEOS' Luke Plapp who kept the peloton under control for Adam Yates and Filippo Ganna.

With 3 kilometers to go Intermarché tried exploding the group, with an attack by Jan Hirt splitting the group afterwards, but with no collaboration the peloton ended up entering the final kilometer with around twenty riders in for the fight for the win.

UAE lead out the sprint for Pogacar, with Luke Plapp and Ruben Guerreiro trying to surprise at the end, but when the Slovenian launched his sprint no-one could match. Adam Yates and Aleksandr Vlasov wrapped up the podium as a tiny split saw Ganna just barely missing out on the race lead.