On the heels of an utterly dominant 2024 campaign, UAE Team Emirates-XRG could have been forgiven for celebrating too hard in the offseason and coming into 2025 a bit undercooked. They went in a different direction.
Tadej Pogačar and his teammates are somehow off to an even stronger start to this season than they were last year.
On Wednesday, Juan Ayuso took his second victory of the season, and his second in the last week, putting on a show at the Trofeo Laigueglia and helping to show that UAE's lack of success in the Opening Weekend races was more of a blip than a trend. Ayuso's win is the team's 14th so far on the year, which is impressive in its own right and even more so when you consider that the team only had 10 wins at this point in 2024.
Last year's squad would go on to lay waste to their rival teams in the WorldTour peloton, ultimately finishing the year with more than double the UCI points of every other team bar Visma-Lease a Bike, which was nonetheless a very distant second.
In short: UAE has squarely established itself as the new top dog in the peloton and they only seem to be getting better. As that happens, they are reshaping the sport itself, contending in both stage races and one-day events in a way that we have not seen in some time. That the reigning Tour de France champ is the odds-on favorite for the upcoming Strade Bianche – when perhaps just two seasons ago it would have seemed strange for anyone to be favored over the whole field at a gravel-heavy one-day race – is a shining example of the way UAE is shifting paradigms. If the team and its star can keep that sort of thing up for the rest of the season, we may find ourselves needing to reevaluate many of our preconceived notions about the state of the sport in 2025.
First, though, we should appreciate how wide-ranging UAE's success is. Pogačar's continued dominance is a big reason why the team is so strong, of course, but so is the supporting cast.
Even in 2024, UAE's lead in the UCI standings was so great that the team's points haul without Pogačar still would have topped Visma's. So far in 2025, UAE has racked up five WorldTour wins (stages and the overall titles at the Tour Down Under and the UAE Tour) and six ProSeries wins, and plenty of those have come from riders not named Tadej. Again, even without Pogačar, they would sit atop the UCI's team rankings on the young season in 2025, ahead of an overhauled XDS-Astana that deserves a lot of credit for its success so far.
Alongside Pogačar, the stars of the show in the early goings have been Ayuso, António Morgado, Adam Yates, and newcomer Jhonatan Narváez. That long list of performers bodes well for UAE's future – and should be of concern to the rest of a peloton that so often focuses only on Pogačar. Ayuso, for instance, is targeting the Giro d'Italia this year, and so is Yates; if Primož Roglič and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe thought that prioritizing the Giro would make for an easy Grand Tour win, they could have another thing coming when May rolls around and Yates and Ayuso roll up to the start line.
At just 22, Ayuso should only get better for the next few years, and the early returns are already impressive, with an Itzulia Basque Country overall victory the biggest win on his palmares so far. The knock on Ayuso last year was the way the second half of his season unfolded, as he seemed to fade at the Tour while simultaneously getting into some intra-team drama when he appeared uninterested in working for Pogačar. He ultimately abandoned the race due to a COVID-19 positive, and found himself earning a torrent of criticism from the enigmatic X user Mou, whose social media screeds garner more attention than most anonymous interneters.
That he could start his 2025 campaign off so strong with one-day wins at both the Faun Drôme Classic and now the Trofeo Laigueglia, both sporting impressive fields despite not being WorldTour events, suggests that Ayuso handled the pressure and criticism just fine. Morgado stepping up, Pogačar and Yates continuing to deliver, and Narváez winning immediately upon joining the team all point in a similar direction: UAE does not appear to be suffering a post-2024 hangover the way that Visma experienced a post-2023 hangover.
After dominating all three Grand Tours in 2023 (although UAE actually accrued more UCI points that year), Visma was waylaid by crashes in March and April of 2024. The team did not win any Monuments or Grand Tours on the season, instead watching as UAE firmly claimed its place at the top of the peloton pecking order.
At least at the moment, everything seems to be continuing to go UAE's way. Riders that have been in the squad for a few years are developing apace while newcomers immediately deliver even if other performers (like Marc Hirschi) have moved on. We certainly seem destined for another year of UAE dominance, which will have rival teams racking their brains for ways to flip the script – and could also raise the risk of UAE fatigue for fans.
For now, the team has mostly avoided generating the sort of sentiment that fans started to feel about Sky when that team was it its most dominant, probably because Pogačar races so aggressively and also because UAE's dominance is still relatively new. That said, another full season of results like the ones we have seen so far could produce a few dreaded yawns among fans yearning for more competition. The team's ability to field potential winners in practically every one-day race or stage race on the calendar is unprecedented in recent history. Even at the height of Sky's powers, the team was not also winning the Tour of Flanders, while the Quick-Step squads of the 2010s were content to crush the cobbles without extending their prowess to the Grand Tours.
UAE's ability to contend in both areas, with Pogačar leading the way but with some other rising stars waiting in the wings as well, is still too new to be all that worried about turning fans off, but that risk is real if things stay this way.
Then again, it is still very, very early, and in sport, everything can change in an instant – or in Visma's case last year, in the span of about a week. After all, Visma did get off to a flying start in 2024, winning both races of Opening Weekend and bossing both Tirreno-Adriatico and Paris-Nice, only to have everything fall apart between March 27, when Wout van Aert crashed out of Dwars door Vlaanderen, and April 4, when Jonas Vingegaard crashed out of the Itzulia Basque Country. The team had 18 wins up to that point in the season and finished the season with 32, an impressive haul given the circumstances but far fewer than anyone would have expected as of March 26.
In other words, UAE can and should feel optimistic for the rest of the year considering how well things are going right now, and that is likely to be even truer after this weekend at Strade Bianche – but they can't afford to get cocky. It's a long season, and there is plenty of time for the narrative to change.
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