Cyclist
How do you beat a cycling superteam?
It might not feel like it a lot of the time, but beating a superteam in cycling is actually possible.
To find out just how it’s done, we’ve looked at Team Sky in the 2010s as well as Visma-Lease a Bike and UAE Team Emirates in the 2020s to look for common threads in terms of where their weak points lie.
Team Sky’s golden years
Team Sky quickly began to solidify their status as the team to beat at the Tour de France from their first win with Bradley Wiggins in 2012. Their maiden victory immediately turned to a stranglehold, with Chris Froome winning in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017, Geraint Thomas winning in 2018 and Egan Bernal winning in 2019.
The only miss happened in 2014, when Froome entered the race as favourite in an expected showdown against Alberto Contador but crashed out on Stage 5’s Paris-Roubaix tribute before he’d even reached the cobbles.
Roubaix reared its head again at the 2018 Tour on a hectic stage that saw more hit the ground than stay on their bike. Team Sky’s Gianni Moscon crashed coming onto the Mons-en-Pévèle sector; Froome was on his wheel and had nowhere else to go but was able to remount and carry on. He managed to finish at the same time as the other top GC riders but was already behind teammate Thomas in the GC, and it was the Welshman who’d take over team leadership and win that year.
Cobbles seemed to add a level of anxiety to Team Sky. They were always the favourites for the Tour so perhaps had more eyes and expectations on them when these moments arose – whether they were already in the maillot jaune or not – and they couldn’t control the race like they could everywhere else. Try to attack them here and you might just have caused some havoc.
Riders could somewhat escape the team at the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España thanks to Sky’s full focus on the Tour de France and their unwillingness to spread themselves too thin. The Classics was a similar story; we all remember Ian Stannard’s legendary victory against four Etixx-Quck Step riders, but that was very much the exception to the rule in one-day races.
Equally, if you were a sprinter, you didn’t have to worry about Team Sky. Mark Cavendish flew the flag for a season and Elia Viviani stuck around for three seasons with minor success, but sprinting was never a priority for Sky.
Their focus was so centred on winning the Tour that there wasn’t much of a plan for the future. They weren’t opposed to signing youngsters, especially rising British talent such as Tao Geoghegan Hart, but they did not have an established development team and eventually paid the price –although they couldn’t have foreseen Bernal’s training crash.
What’s more, the end of their reign coincided with the emergence of two new super powers…
Jumbo-Visma/Visma-Lease a Bike
After a tumultuous 2010 that almost saw the team fold when longtime sponsor Rabobank pulled out, the rebrand to Jumbo-Visma and the ascendence of Primož Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard helped spearhead one of the oldest teams in the peloton back to the top.
Jumbo-Visma were beginning to challenge as the Team Sky era came to an end, with Steven Kruijswijk coming closest to Grand Tour success at the 2019 Tour. Their true period as a superteam came with their first yellow jersey win at the Tour through Vingegaard in 2022 (although they thought they’d done it through Roglič in 2020). In dominating fashion, they then won all three Grand Tours in 2023 and – just to rub salt in the wound for other teams – did so with three different riders in Roglič, Vingegaard and Sepp Kuss.
Aside from 2023, they have been hit and miss at both the Giro and the Vuelta, generally emulating Sky’s French focus. In Italy, the entire team was absent from the list of finishers in 2020 (withdrawn due to Covid in fairness); their top rider finished ninth in 2021, 20th in 2022 and after winning in 2023 they were back to 22nd in 2024. In Spain they have fared better, Roglič dominated from 2019 to 2021, but their top finisher came 30th for 2022 and 14th in 2024 – though they locked out the podium in incredible fashion in 2023.
When trying to defeat this superteam, you must defeat either Vingegaard, Wout van Aert or both. Van Aert is a Swiss army knife, who is always up there in the Classics, wins bunch sprints, time-trials and even mountain stages in Grand Tours, and is a valuable domestique when he’s called upon.
It would be understandable if their reliance on the Belgian was to be their undoing, but both Jan Tratnik and Matteo Jorgenson stepped up big earlier last season when Van Aert was out injured, though wins were few and far between compared to 2023. Visma-Lease a Bike is a well-oiled machine – save for the odd chaotic moment at the Tour – and while, much like Sky before them, Roubaix’s cobbles – and later a gravel stage – threatened to derail their Tour de France, they’ve generally been able to survive.
The real place where Visma are lacking is in Monuments. Theoretically, they have the talent to win any and all of them, however they’ve struggled to put together the expected results. They won two in 2020 with Wout van Aert in Milan-San Remo and Primož Roglič in a thrilling Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but aside from that, the team’s last Monument victory was 2010, and in fact, they only won four Monuments between 1991 and 2020. With that being said, beating Van Aert, Jorgenson, Dylan van Baarle and co in big Classics is no mean feat, and they’ll always be among the favourites.
If you want to beat Visma-Lease a Bike, your best chance is in Monuments or at the Giro.
UAE Team Emirates
Where’s the weakness for a team with 81 wins last season? Let’s look at the team leader. Tadej Pogačar is one of the greatest riders of all time but even he loses sometimes. Last year, we went more in-depth on how to beat the Slovenian, and found out flat time-trials resulted in 14% of his defeats over the past two seasons and small group or one-on-one sprints accounted for 24%.
The most reliable way of beating Pogačar in a one-day race or Grand Tour stage however is either through a breakaway (29% of his defeats) or a late attack (33%). There are other factors at play here too, like how much of a threat you are in the general classification. If you’re not a direct challenger, a late attack in the final 10km works best. If you can get the jump.
That’s just Pogačar. UAE Team Emirates XRG are the most stacked team in the men’s peloton with a roster including João Almeida, Adam Yates, Juan Ayuso, Isaac del Toro and Jhonathan Narváez to name just a few. Almeida, Yates and Ayuso all have Grand Tour podiums to their name with the potential of winning one soon, and Del Toro is one of the brightest hopes for the future along with neopro Pablo Torres. Narváez, meanwhile, is the only man to thwart Pogačar’s straight run of an entire Giro spent in the maglia rosa – so UAE went and signed him.
If Vingegaard falters for Visma-Lease a Bike, a Plan B for GC is hard to come by. At UAE, however, they have plans all the way from A to Z. Someone is always close to Pogačar in the standings to take control if necessary (although it hasn’t been so far), like Yates was in 2023 when he made the podium behind his second-placed leader.
There’s more of a chance in the spring Classics though (don’t bother with the Italian Classics, they’re Pogačar’s). They achieved only two wins here in 2024 with Pogačar at Strade Bianche and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, although if you go back another year, he won the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold Race and Flèche Wallonne. The one Monument he is yet to start is Paris-Roubaix, a race the team is also yet to win, and the one race that he consistently takes part in but hasn’t yet won is Milan-San Remo.
How do you beat UAE Team Emirates XRG? Prayers are your best bet. Apart from that, breaking away or staging a late attack for a Grand Tour stage, sprinting, or heading to Milan-San Remo or Paris-Roubaix – for now.
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