Flung into last year's Vuelta a España as a last-minute substitution for Picnic PostNL's ill leader Max Poole, just a glance at the subsequent results sheets shows how keenly Kevin Vermaerke followed what was likely the only instruction on the Picnic team bus message board each morning: 'Get into breaks.'
But whenever Vermaerke did get into a breakaway at the Vuelta – no fewer than six in nine days, five of them over 100 kilometres long – there was one thing about all of them that hardly ever changed, he said at December's off-season training camp with his new squad, UAE Team Emirates-XRG.
