Adam Yates Wins Stage 3 to Take Over UAE Tour G.C.
Adam Yates of the Mitchelton-SCOTT team has climbed to his first race win of the season in a dominant display up the Jebel Hafeet climb on stage three of the UAE Tour.
Teammate Luka Mezgec set a strong pace for Yates on the lower slopes of the final climb before Ethiopian Tsgabu Grmay took over to control the gap to a lone attacker. Having seen enough, Yates launched his move, racing past the lone leader with two riders for company.
With little commitment from his fellow attackers, Yates jumped again with five kilometres to go and opened up a gap of 40 seconds. Tadej Pogačar (UAE-Team Emirates) attempted to chase, but he couldn’t make any inroads to the advantage of the flying Brit who raced away to take the stage by over one minute.
“It is my first race of the season, so it was difficult for me to estimate where I stood compared to the competition,” said Yates at the finish. “Certainly with today’s heat, it’s difficult to estimate, I think it was 37 to 38 degrees all day. I just wanted to test the legs to see where I am.
“That was perhaps a little too early [to attack], but I felt good. A few boys came along and behind me I could see that they organised themselves. I just went for it then.
“We have to climb this climb again and maybe my legs are not so good then. I’ve heard about tomorrow’s stage that winds might be coming. We will see.”
British Cycling Loses Top Sponsor (AP)
The governing body of British cycling will lose its main sponsor after the Tokyo Olympics, potentially harming the long-term strength of the country’s top-performing sport at recent games.
HSBC has decided to exercise a break clause midway through an eight-year partnership with British Cycling “due to a shift in UK marketing and partnership priorities,” the governing body said on Tuesday.
Former British Cycling doctor Richard Freeman is the subject of an ongoing medical tribunal. He faces being struck off by the General Medical Council after accepting 18 of 22 charges against him, including ordering testosterone and lying about it to UK Anti-Doping. He has denied ordering it knowing or believing that it was intended to enhance an athlete’s performance.
Chris Froome Discusses Challenges of Comeback (London Times)
Chris Froome has revealed how thoughts of being a professional cyclist again seemed remote when he was left having to learn to walk again following his serious crash last year.
The four-times Tour de France champion suffered a broken hip, fractured femur, fractured elbow and broken ribs as part of a catalogue of injuries when he came off his time-trial bike at high speed in June 2019.
“Trying to walk was by far the hardest part of the rehab,” Froome told the Times. “It’s just something you don’t think about until you’re in that position.
“After the weeks of being bedridden and in a wheelchair afterwards, walking felt so foreign. Mentally, it was tough. Being barely able to walk, thinking about being a professional cyclist again seemed so far away.”
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