"We know we can't sleep on our laurels, that we can't take things for granted" - UAE expecting the best Jonas Vingegaard at 2025 Tour de France

UAE Team Emirates - XRG were the unquestioned leaders in the peloton across the 2024 season, taking the most victories and among them some of the biggest successes on the calendar. According to team boss Joxean Matxin though, there is still room for improvement.

"We're not changing the sport completely, but it's another kind of cycling," Matxin explains to Cycling News. "It is not the same kind of cycling as, say, Sky nor [1990s Spanish powerhouse] Banesto. It's about generating an ambitious and victorious collective, and that's something I'm trying to help create. We're not just focussed on having the best rider in the world. We count on Tadej Pogacar and we build on that but we are also interested in having a team which is competitive everywhere on all fronts."

Although the aforementioned Pogacar ruled the roost in 2024, taking two Grand Tours, two Monuments and a World Championship title among other victories, Matxin is keen to insist there is much more to UAE Team Emirates - XRG than just the all-conquering Slovenian. "We know the Tour de France is much more important, of course we know that. But for UAE, there are no small races, all races matter from the first to the last. So that idea of going to a race to train for other races is something that doesn't happen with us - that's called training and that's what you do at home," he explains. "Rather our mentality is to be competitive from start to finish, and not to give anything away to anybody."

"We've improved everything, no matter what place it has in our priorities: we've got better in terms of aerodynamics, best practice, nutrition, training, planning, calendar, human relations..." he continues. "But like everything in life, the way to improve is realising where you've made mistakes, seeing what you can change, drawing your own conclusions. It's never a question of 'copy/paste' from other teams playbooks, and we don't want to stay the same either."

It hasn't always been so successful at UAE, although these struggles helped forge the winning mentality according to Matxin. "We've lived through our own moments of knowing how it feels when you're going to lose the Tour, even if you'd gone in there hungry and determined to fight to the last. Of reaching a point when you know the race has gone and, equally, when you know how much you want to fight to get it again," he says. "Obviously, the consequences of the two crashes are not at all comparable, even if our case was 15-20 days closer to the Tour than Jonas Vingegaard's in April. But for both, during the race itself there'll have been a feeling of uncertainty generated by those predicaments - a feeling that hits you really hard."

"You're aware, too, that during the countdown there'll have been times when you won't have been able to work and train but your rivals will. And the uncertainty of what that implies is partly what drives you up the wall. But it's what drives you on as well," Matxin adds. "So we know that Vingegaard will be going through the a similar moment to the one that we experienced. As a result of which, we know we can't sleep on our laurels, that we can't take things for granted. Tadej's won three Tours, now, but if you want to be in the fight and go for a fourth Tour then you have to deserve it."