Brit Adam Yates will return to altitude to prepare to the Giro d’Italia following his victory at the O Gran Camino stage race in Spain this week.
Yates and the entire UAE Team Emirates-XRG Giro squad will decamp to Sierra Nevada in the weeks before the Italian grand tour.
Expected to joining Yates in southern Spain will be João Almeida, Jay Vine and Marc Soler among others.
Yates staked a claim to lead the team with his win at O Gran Camino where he finished ahead of Jørgen Nordhagen (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Alessandro Pinarello (NSN Cycling Team).
However, Yates, who has spent much of his last three years at UAE Emirates-XRG playing faithful lieutenant to Tadej Pogačar, was keen to emphasise he remains a team player.
“We’re going to go there with a strong team and some options,” he said after sealing O Gran Camino victory. “We know the competition will be quite strong so I think it’s good we go with some options.
“We’ll see. First you have to have the legs, have the condition and hopefully the result will come.”
Yates will likely share leadership duties with Almeida who finished second to Remco Evnepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hangrohe) at Volta Comunitat Valenciana and was on the podium at Volta Algarve earlier this season.
Yates’s win in northern Spain was built on his stage win on stage four, the first victory of his 2026 season.
The Lancastrian accelerated away four kilometres from the top of the short but steep Alto de Cabeza de Meda. By the time he reached the line he’d put Nordhagen and just over a minute into Pinarello.
The next day on the race’s final stage he just had to, as he put it “play it safe”, to protect his lead on the race’s final climbing test.
"It was a hard climb, but actually it was quite short, and it was not super steep, but with the wind coming from the ocean, it made it quite difficult," Yates said. "So I decided to play it a little bit safe, keep the pace quite high and just do my pace, and then I knew it would be difficult for the other guys to attack, so I'm happy to finish it off.
