"You want to be in the box seat after today's stage," was the clear message Jayco AlUla sports director Mathew Hayman told Cyclingnews before the start of stage 2 of the Santos Tour Down Under to Uraidla. That, however, ended up being a position decisively held by UAE Team Emirates-XRG by the end of the day, but the Australian squad did come home as the best of the rest with a strong performance from Mauro Schmid.
Schmid took third place on the stage from the chase behind the winning teammates of Jay Vine and Jhonatan Narváez, with the Swiss champion sprinting to a position on the stage and overall podium from a chase of eight.
Still, there was little anyone could do to chase down the gap to the powerful duo of UAE riders out front so Schmid ended the stage with a gap of 1:05 to race leader Vine and 59 seconds to Narváez, with the pair having taken off after Adam Yates softened up the bunch for the attack. Yates is also now sitting ninth overall at 1:23, just 18 seconds back from Schmid, while O'Connor is in 13th place at 1:28
"Hats off to UAE, to Jay, to the whole team," said Hayman immediately after the stage. "You know, we expected that, could 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 to change bikes in the approach which left him out of the running in a crucial stage.
"Mauro rode a great race to then not only get third, I think he was probably best placed in that group before he got third," said Hayman, speaking before there had been time to examine the official results in detail but highlighting the fact that Schmid had already set himself up well in the GC with a powerful prologue.
"So that's a good result for us there," said Hayman of Schmid's third on stage 2. "But obviously, we want to race for the win but there wasn't a lot we could do about those guys."
So the question is what comes next? Is it even feasible to try and pull back a minute on such strong rivals?
"You could say it's never over till it's over, but even if one of them gets a puncture they've still got three other wheels in the race so at the moment, they're the strongest," said Hayman. "Believe me, I racked my brains for ways to make this stage harder and suit my climbers more because it wasn't ideal for them but there was no real way to make the race harder without suiting UAE even more."
The challenging odds, however, don't mean that the team is ready to wave the flag of surrender and completely capitulate at their home WorldTour race.
"We will go back, have a look at it. Look at our options. Plapp is off GC now after that mechanical, so he's still feeling good," said Hayman of the rider who is now in 26th place overall. "So let's just keep going. You know, there's still Willunga to be run and won and we'll see if there is another way to attack this."
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