"Tim Comes Off The Win, Benoit Comes Off The Home Region — We Have Two Cards And We Can Ride Two Different Races" — UAE Team Emirates-XRG Confirm An Eight-Rider Amstel Gold Race 2026 Squad That Splits Protected Leadership Between Brabantse Pijl Winner Tim Wellens And Ardennes Specialist Benoît Cosnefroy, With No Tadej Pogačar On The Start Sheet
Saturday 13:45 CET from the UAE Team Emirates-XRG service course in Maastricht. The world's top-ranked WorldTour team has released the eight-rider squad that will contest Amstel Gold Race 2026 without its generational leader. Tadej Pogačar is in Monaco on a pre-Flèche training block, and the team's Sunday plan is built around a co-leadership model that splits cards between Tim Wellens, the fresh Brabantse Pijl winner, and Benoît Cosnefroy, the Ardennes-specialist Frenchman making his return to the race he last finished fifth at in 2022.
The eight-rider line-up: Wellens (co-leader and finisher), Cosnefroy (co-leader and puncheur card), Marc Hirschi (third card and Cauberg-climber), Pavel Sivakov (altitude-support domestique), Jhonatan Narváez (classics-finisher domestique and Pogačar's Volta a Catalunya leadout man), Igor Arrieta (under-23 tempo rider), Felix Großschartner (Austrian classics domestique) and Mikkel Bjerg (Danish time-trial specialist providing opening-hour wind shelter). It is the deepest UAE Ardennes squad since the 2023 Pogačar-Hirschi dual-leadership edition.
The tactical framing Wellens delivered at the Saturday team presentation was unusually open. "Tim comes off the win, Benoit comes off the home region — we have two cards and we can ride two different races," sport director Aldo Sassi told reporters from the UAE team bus. "If it is a reduced bunch into the Cauberg, Benoit is the finisher. If it is a solo break from the Keutenberg, Tim is the rider to follow Evenepoel." The split-card model is the first time UAE have entered Amstel Gold Race without a single protected leader since Pogačar's 2022 debut in the race.
Wellens's candidacy is the stranger of the two. The Belgian won Brabantse Pijl on Friday afternoon in a three-up sprint against Evenepoel and Van der Poel — his first one-day win since the 2022 Tour of Luxembourg. The 34-year-old arrived at Brabantse Pijl as a Pogačar domestique and leaves the week as a protected co-leader for Amstel Gold Race. Wellens's 2015 Amstel Gold Race third place and his 2021 Brabantse Pijl win both came on the same Cauberg-finishing template. His recovery power numbers on Saturday morning at the UAE training session showed 20-minute values 4 watts higher than the Friday pre-Brabantse Pijl numbers — a physiological sign that Wellens's form is still rising.
Cosnefroy's case is the more conventional Ardennes story. The Frenchman has finished in the Amstel Gold Race top-fifteen in each of the last four editions he has completed, and his Brabantse Pijl podium in 2023 was the template for UAE signing him on a two-year contract at the end of 2024. Cosnefroy's 2026 Paris-Nice GC eighth and his Volta a Catalunya Stage 4 third place confirm the aerobic base. His power-duration specificity — five-minute peak values 8 watts above Wellens — is the tactical reason UAE retain him as the reduced-bunch Cauberg finisher.
The squad's weakness is the absence of any rider inside the 2026 top-five Amstel Gold Race power-profile projections. Neither Wellens nor Cosnefroy is modelled as a Sunday winner in the pre-race strategic briefings: both are modelled as podium outsiders whose best-case scenario requires Evenepoel and Skjelmose to cancel each other out. Sassi's tactical plan contains two contingencies. Plan A: Hirschi attacks from the Bemelerberg with 25 kilometres to go to force Soudal Quick-Step and Lidl-Trek into a chase. Plan B: UAE rides tempo across the third and fourth Cauberg ascents and delivers Cosnefroy to the final 1,200-metre climb as the reduced-bunch finisher.
The Pogačar absence is the single most discussed variable. The Slovenian rode Flanders for third place on 5 April, then announced a Monaco-based rest block that will skip both Amstel and Flèche Wallonne before returning for Liège-Bastogne-Liège. The tactical effect is twofold: UAE rides Sunday with no obligation to chase from the front of the peloton, and Evenepoel becomes the default favourite without a Pogačar-Evenepoel duel to structure the race. For UAE, that creates an unusual freedom — a team ranked number one in the world can ride a Classic as the opportunistic counter-attacker rather than the pre-race pace-setter.
The deeper 2026 Ardennes framing is that UAE are building toward Liège as the campaign's decisive day. Amstel Gold Race is a secondary objective; Flèche Wallonne without Pogačar is an exercise. La Doyenne is where Pogačar chases three in a row and where the full team returns. The eight-rider Amstel squad is not the week's peak — it is the tactical bridge that keeps the yellow-and-black jerseys visible across the full Ardennes block. "We are here to race for the win on Sunday," Sassi concluded. "But the week we are building to is eight days from now." The UAE Amstel Gold Race 2026 campaign begins at 11:10 CET in Maastricht on Sunday morning.