🎥 UAE and Unibet Rose Rockets share the footage you want to see after Milan-Sanremo

Let’s start with UAE, where naturally everything revolves around the moment Pogačar suddenly finds himself on the ground on the run-in to the Cipressa. “I hurt my knee pretty bad,” he can be heard saying over the radio in the team’s Instagram footage. “Do what you can, Tadej,” comes the reply from the car, while Isaac Del Toro and Brandon McNulty are instructed to stay in the first group, with Del Toro specifically told to stay on the wheel of Mathieu van der Poel.

“Tadej is coming back,” sports director Andrej Hauptman then says, after which McNulty is handed a crucial role: bring Pogačar back to the front and into position for the launch platform on the Cipressa. There, Del Toro is waiting to give him the final push. Once Pogačar reaches the front with Tom Pidcock and Van der Poel, the message is crystal clear: “Now use your head, Tadej.”

Pogačar is told to wait until the steepest section of the Poggio before going all-in. Then comes the moment of excitement: “Van der Poel is dropped, Van der Poel is dropped!” Pogačar and Pidcock head towards the finish together, and the doubt in Hauptman’s eyes says everything. “You can do it, man, you can do it,” he says. Only when Pogi secures the win does the emotion finally spill out, especially from driver and sporting manager Joxean Matxín.

In the Unibet Rose Rockets' video, there is far less pure joy, because the ProTeam never really managed to make an impact on its debut in La Primavera. At first it all looks a bit like a school trip, until the race reaches the Cipressa and the faces inside the car turn serious. Tomas Kopecký delivers team leader Lukas Kubiš brilliantly to the foot of the Cipressa, as can be seen on the saddle camera.

“One day you win, one day you lose,” is the conclusion at the finish on Via Roma in Sanremo. After Dylan Groenewegen’s victory in Bredene-Koksijde, this was something of a reality check. “We’re a little disappointed. Tomas said it was perfect until the foot of the Cipressa, but they just didn’t have the legs and the other riders are simply better at this point.”

That was Bas Tietema speaking. Realism clearly prevailed, although he would still have liked to see Kubiš make it into the chasing group. “Then we could at least have sprinted for a result, but we just weren’t there. There is a lot of potential for us in races like this, and we will now focus on the next Monument.”