Review of the 2024 season for UAE Team Emirates: Tadej Pogacar wins the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the World Championship, making it a historic year for the team.

We’ve looked back at the seasons of all 2024 World Tour teams over the past few months. We’ve had many low points and many good points. We’ve looked at what each team needs to do to either build on their gains or start over and get back on track in 2025. We only have one more team to look over now. Everyone has been waiting for this one. Here comes UAE Team Emirates and Tadej Pogacar, who made this season one of the best we’ve ever seen. Also, where do we start?

Just like in 2023, the team ended the year ranked first in the UCI rankings. But this time, they had an amazing 37,407.6 points. That’s almost twice as many points as the second-place team, Visma | Lease a Bike, who had 20,428. This year, UAE Team Emirates was in a league of their own, with an amazing 81 wins. They were by far the best team, beating Visma and everyone else.

But how did they become so powerful? What was so great about their 2024 season? Let’s get into the specifics.

UAE Team Emirates was started in 2017 and has quickly become one of the most powerful cycling teams, thanks to great management and investments in top riders. The team is led by Mauro Gianetti and Matxin Fernandez, and it has sponsors from the UAE. Their long-term goal is to be the best in all types of riding, on all surfaces. In 2021, Pogacar had just won his second yellow jersey and looked like he was going to take over the sport. But after Jonas Vingegaard came on the scene in 2022, the team lost the last two Tour de Frances by a large margin.

There were good times and bad times during the 2023 season. During the spring, Pogacar won a lot of races, including the Amstel Gold and the Tour of Flanders. But an accident at Liège-Bastogne-Liège hurt his wrist and stopped him from getting ready for the Tour de France. Even though he tried hard, Jonas Vingegaard beat him in the mountains in July 2023. This made some people wonder if UAE Team Emirates could get back to being the best. All three grand tours were won by Visma. Had the pendulum forever swung in favor of Vingegaard and Visma?

In the year 2024, the team gave a strong response to every reviewer. Not only did Pogacar shine, but the whole team did. It was without a doubt one of the best seasons in the history of racing.

Spring Time

Early on in the 2024 season, UAE Team Emirates set the tone, and they won a lot of races. The story began at the Santos Tour Down Under, where Isaac Del Toro won stage 2 and gave the team its first win of the year. The next race was the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana, where Brandon McNulty won stage 4 and the overall GC. Adam Yates then added another GC win at the Tour of Oman, showing that the team has a lot of experience in early-season stage races.

Then Tadej Pogacar joined the group on the white roads in Italy. His first race of the season at Strade Bianche was a good sign of things to come. Pogacar wiped out the field with an 81-kilometer solo attack, ending almost three minutes ahead of the next competitor. Pogacar won the first race of the season for the fourth year in a row. As we now know, it was the start of many stupid long-range charges.

The Volta a Catalunya was Pogacar’s next big race. He won stages 2, 3, 6, and 7, as well as the overall title. Just his 250 points from this race gave the team a big boost in the first few weeks and months of 2024.

The UAE isn’t usually good at the cobblestone classics, but Nils Politt did really well there, taking third at the Tour of Flanders and fourth at Paris-Roubaix. At the same time, Filippo Baroncini won the SUPER 8 Classic, and Juan Ayuso won the overall GC at the Itzulia Basque Country after Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel, and Primoz Roglic’s hopes were dashed by a terrible crash.

At the end of the spring, Pogacar won a great race at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, which had been the worst race of his 2023 season. He stayed on his bike this time and struck with more than 30 km to go. He blew the field apart and won the monument for the second time; he had won it before in 2021.

With everyone on the team working hard, UAE Team Emirates went into the grand tour season full of optimism and ready to take back the crown.

The Grand Tour Season

If spring was amazing, then the grand tour season was truly famous. The UAE Team Emirates had one of the best seasons in the history of racing.

When Tadej Pogacar said he would try to do the Giro-Tour double, people in the racing world were skeptical. This had not been done by a rider in more than 25 years. The last person to do it was the late Marco Pantani in 1998. A lot of cycling experts thought that Pogacar would not be able to finish the Giro and then get back in shape in time for the Tour in just five weeks. But Pogacar put his doubters to rest with acts that people will talk about for years to come.

Pogacar took charge early in the Giro d’Italia. He won stage 2 and the pink jersey, which he would never give up. He went on to win stages 7, 8, 15, 16, and 20, giving him a lead of almost 10 minutes in the general classification. His competitors had a hard time keeping up with him, but Pogacar won one of the most powerful grand tours we have ever seen.

Then the question was whether he could get better in time to race against Jonas Vingegaard at the Tour de France in just five weeks. His Danish rival had easily beaten him a year before. Would his three weeks in Italy have an effect on him in France?

While that was going on, the team kept winning at the Tour de Suisse. Adam Yates just barely beat Joao Almeida for the overall victory, and along the way, the two UAE men swapped stage wins. The UAE’s Tour de France team, which included Pogacar, Juan Ayuso, Adam Yates, Joao Almeida, Pavel Sivakov, Marc Soler, Nils Politt, and Tim Wellens, may have been one of the best ever put together. In the past, Pogacar had been left alone in the mountains with Visma’s yellow all around it. This year, that wouldn’t happen.

He took over a minute off of his competitors and won stage 4 on the Galibier, which saw him pass Vingegaard, Evenepoel, and Roglic. For a short time on stage 11, Vingegaard beat him to the finish line, but Pogacar came back and won stages 14, 15, 19, 20, and 21, destroying his foes and winning his third Tour de France title. How does this compare to the best Tour de France efforts of all time?

In 2024, Pogacar won 12 stages of the grand tour. He won 7 stages at the Tour and 5 stages at the Giro. His win at the Tour gave UAE Team Emirates 500 UCI points, and his win at the Giro gave them another 400 points. It wasn’t just the Slovenian who did well; Joao Almeida finished fourth in the Tour GC and Adam Yates came in sixth, giving the team even more points.

During the Vuelta a España, Almeida and Yates were in charge of the team while Pogacar was not there. Almeida looked strong at first, but COVID made him give up. Yates saved the campaign with a win on stage 9, but the team missed out on the GC podium. That doesn’t matter for the team in the big picture, though, because Pogacar wasn’t done yet.

After a well-deserved break after the Tour, Pogacar’s season reached its peak at the World Championships road race in Zurich, where he went on a 100-kilometer solo attack to win the rainbow jersey. Only the third rider in history has ever won all three races. Pogacar then won Il Lombardia, capping off what was probably the best cycling season ever.

Transfers

Even though UAE Team Emirates was already the best in 2024, they have made some big changes to their squad for 2025:

Marc Hirschi and Finn Fisher-Black left the team, and Jhonatan Narvaez from INEOS Grenadiers has joined. In May, Narvaez beat Pogacar on the first stage of the Giro. Now, he will ride with the best rider in the world to help him.

Florian Vermeersch will make their classics team stronger, and Julius Johansen and Rune Herregodts will make their time trial team even stronger. Pablo Torres, who is 19 years old and broke Chris Froome’s record for the Colle delle Finestre, is a rising star who will be on the team in 2025.

The final score is 9.5/10.

It shows how good the team was that 9.5/10 seems too low. People who follow cycling will remember the 2024 season for UAE Team Emirates as one of the best ever. The team completely beat Visma’s foes in 2023, with 81 wins, Tadej Pogacar’s Giro-Tour double, and a rainbow jersey. Pogacar’s performances were nothing short of legendary, but the whole team made this a season that set a new standard for greatness.

A 10/10 would have been given if they had won the Vuelta. If Joao Almeida had stayed healthy, they might have done that. Next year, Pogacar is likely to try to win both the Tour and the Vuelta, as well as the red jersey, which is the only grand tour he hasn’t done yet. Juan Ayuso may finally get his chance to shine at the Giro.

When they think about 2025, the task will be to keep this level, which has never been seen before. UAE Team Emirates looks like it will stay at the top of the racing world for a long time. Pogacar is still at the top of his game, and the team is full of talented riders.