How UAE Team Emirates Suffocated the Peloton on the Molenberg to Blow Flanders Apart
Tadej Pogacar's Oude Kwaremont attack will dominate the highlights reels, but anyone who watched the 2026 Tour of Flanders attentively will know that the race was already half-won by the time the Slovenian launched his decisive move. The work of UAE Team Emirates-XRG on the innocuous-looking Molenberg, more than 60 kilometres from Oudenaarde, turned a Monument showdown into a one-man procession and will go down as one of the finest team tactical performances of this spring.
The Molenberg is only 400 metres long and averages under seven per cent, a climb that on paper has no business being decisive in a 271-kilometre race containing the Kwaremont, the Paterberg and a dozen other more famous walls. But UAE understood something their rivals did not: by attacking relentlessly on a climb where everyone expected a lull, they could drain the legs of the men who were counting on the steeper finale to launch their own efforts.
Florian Vermeersch led the move, with Tim Wellens following up, and then Nils Politt applying the hammer on the cobbles at the top. By the time the Molenberg was done, the front group had been cut from forty riders to around twenty-five, and several dangerous outsiders had been distanced. More importantly, Wout van Aert, Mads Pedersen and Mathieu van der Poel had all been forced to close gaps from the second row — effort they would miss an hour later.
It was a signature move from a team that has grown increasingly confident on the cobbles. In 2025, the UAE cobbled project was still a work in progress, with Pogacar forced to do most of the work himself. This spring, the arrival of seasoned classics riders and targeted reinforcement of the roster has given the Slovenian a genuine classics train for the first time in his career. The dividend came on the Molenberg, where UAE had four riders on the front while most other teams had one leader and no support.
"We wanted to make the race hard from far," sporting director Matxin Fernandez said afterwards. "Tadej is the strongest, but he is not unbeatable — you saw that at Milan-San Remo when he crashed. We knew that if we let the race come down to the Paterberg with a big group, anything could happen. So we used the Molenberg to burn the others' legs, and by the Kwaremont we knew he could go alone."
The effect on the other favourites was visible. Remco Evenepoel, on his Tour of Flanders debut, admitted afterwards that he had been surprised by the intensity at that point in the race. "I thought we would have thirty more kilometres before it really started," he said. Pedersen, who finished a brave second, also conceded that the Molenberg phase was where his race was effectively decided — "I was already closing gaps there, and I never really felt completely fresh again."
For Van der Poel, it was a case of déjà vu. The defending champion was forced into his own chasing mode after being caught on the wrong foot by the UAE surge, and by the time he reached the Kwaremont for the final time, he simply did not have the legs to match Pogacar's acceleration. Third place was a fair reflection of his afternoon.
The broader takeaway is that UAE Team Emirates-XRG have cracked a problem that used to plague them: how to use a strong roster on the cobbles without wasting Pogacar's matches. The Molenberg move is now a template, and with Paris-Roubaix one week away, rival teams will be nervously reviewing their own plans. Pogacar may be the superstar, but his team is quietly turning into the most dangerous classics unit in the peloton.