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“Hats off to UAE, to Jay, to the whole team,” said Hayman immediately after the stage. “You know, we expected that, coudl have written it this morning, that Yates was going to wind him up there, and I had hoped it’d be Jay by himself and not with a teammate, that made things even a little bit trickier.”
Even though there was no stopping the charge of UAE Team Emirates-XRG, it was no small effort for Schmid to settle on the podium, as while everything went according to – and even beyond – expectations for Vine’s team, there were some hiccups for Jayco AlUla.
Firstly their plan had been to get the race moving on the first climb of the Corkscrew, which topped out at 73.6km to go, and while Kelland O’Brien made the move when others didn’t play ball and join it inevitably was drawn back in.
“Kell was in position, tried to draw some people out, to try and get rid of some … but nobody else was interested in racing so it’s really hard,” said Hayman.
The squad had also hoped to have one more card to play in the final with the plan being to have Ben O’Connor, Schmid and Luke Plapp there to open up the options but then Plapp had…
Note: The text ends abruptly with “but then Plapp had…”, as that’s where the provided snippet stops. I’ve removed the HTML tags and the “paywall” and “aria-hidden” attributes as they aren’t relevant to the plain text content. I’ve also removed the aside section as it was an advertisement.
