The up-and-down profile of stage 9 of the Tour de France had breakaway written all over it, but for a while there, it wasn't entirely clear whether the move of the day would stay clear. For the umpteenth time, the UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad of race leader Tadej Pogačar rode hard at the front of the bunch to keep things close even though there was hardly any chance of GC action on the stage.
In the end, the break did stay clear and Mathieu van der Poel powered to his first stage win of this year's race, but UAE sure had made the escapees work for it. So why did they chase so hard on an intermediate stage?
In the aftermath of stage 9, there were different answers from different UAE protagonists. Pogačar, asked in the post-stage television interview if there were "ambitions to try and catch them and try to win" the stage, responded in the negative.
"No," he said. "Tim [Wellens] said we should keep them at one minute because he feels good."
That answer alone might suggest that the team was merely trying to keep the race hard for Pogačar's GC rivals – but Wellens himself had a different answer after being a key part of the UAE train that did so much work on the day.
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