Welcome back to the Lantern Rouge cycling podcast with Benji Nyson, the UAE team Emirates 2021 preview, probably one of the most highly anticipated ones, but we said before we started recording, maybe it is the most straight forward, compared to say the other big teams like the Umburg this medic and inos, Benji UAE team Emirates last year, 33 wins, I think 11 or 12 of those.

At world to a level, including the one, Tour de France GC, it's an overperformance, obviously, right?

Yeah, certainly an overperformance, but if you look at it more closely, we see that at the start of the season pre-COVID, we had those sudden American races like Tour of Columbia and San Juan, that gave him quite a few wins because, well, they sent sprints to those races and San Juan, they had Gaviria,

who was getting three stage wins through amazing leadouts by the likes of Rishazian Molano once again, and then eventually in Colombia, it was Molano himself that became a really strong sprinter and won three stage as well.

In Valenciana, we had Tarepo Gacha sweeping up GC and also two stage wins, so he showed directly at the start of the season that he was up there.

And then after COVID, they ended up having, well, national championships and such, but also it started with Cristiano Dofin and Burgos.

And in Burgos, Gaviria won a sprint stage, we had Dofin A where, for Molo won that huge stage where he attacked pretty early on and so forth.

And honestly, it really kicked off the moment to the front started, they started off with Kristoff getting that fast victory in a pretty crazy stage, we all remember that one with the soap on the road.

And then in the Tour de France, he just kept and kept on going.

Pogachar showed that he was up there with the best then, he confirmed that with two major stage wins and his second plays in GC and then obviously it all turned around as well on the second last stage where he also took detour to France, yellow Jazzy and brought that home, which was not really what the majority of people were expecting before the Tour de France started.

And eventually they didn't even more because Yolise was getting those two stage wins in the Giro and not a stage win by Phillips and in the Felta.

So pretty consistent road, all three ground toss.

Do I expect that some riders on the team have unperformed? Yes, I do.

Gaviria, he was not up there and he did get COVID at the start of the season, he got it twice if I recall correctly.

I think he should have done more in the Giro, he disappointed in sprints and eventually didn't really get too many great results there.

And obviously the Mars swept away all the victories there, we expected Gaviria to at least be consistent or competitive in a few of those and wasn't really the case to be honest.

So yeah, it's again, versus the more in those sprints.

So do we expect more from Gaviria in the future? I certainly hope so.

We look back at that Giro, he wrote that quick step a few years ago where he swept away four victories or something.

And in one of those sprints, he launched like 20th position and he possibly literally everybody in the final sprint.

So crazy stuff. And I hope we can see that Gaviria back in the future.

But what's your take on on the season, the thing that were you expecting them to compete at a ground to a 4GC with Pogachar?

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