Adam Yates to prepare for Giro d’Italia at altitude after O Gran Camino victory
UAE Emirates-XRG to send whole Giro d’Italia squad to Sierra Nevada
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Brit Adam Yates will return to altitude to prepare to the Giro d’Italia following his victory at the O Gran Camino stage race in Spain this week.
Yates and the entire UAE Team Emirates-XRG Giro squad will decamp to Sierra Nevada in the weeks before the Italian grand tour.
Expected to joining Yates in southern Spain will be João Almeida, Jay Vine and Marc Soler among others.
Article continues belowYates staked a claim to lead the team with his win at O Gran Camino where he finished ahead of Jørgen Nordhagen (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Alessandro Pinarello (NSN Cycling Team).
However, Yates, who has spent much of his last three years at UAE Emirates-XRG playing faithful lieutenant to Tadej Pogačar, was keen to emphasise he remains a team player.
“We’re going to go there with a strong team and some options,” he said after sealing O Gran Camino victory. “We know the competition will be quite strong so I think it’s good we go with some options.
“We’ll see. First you have to have the legs, have the condition and hopefully the result will come.”
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Yates will likely share leadership duties with Almeida who finished second to Remco Evnepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hangrohe) at Volta Comunitat Valenciana and was on the podium at Volta Algarve earlier this season.
Yates’s win in northern Spain was built on his stage win on stage four, the first victory of his 2026 season.
The Lancastrian accelerated away four kilometres from the top of the short but steep Alto de Cabeza de Meda. By the time he reached the line he’d put Nordhagen and just over a minute into Pinarello.
The next day on the race’s final stage he just had to, as he put it “play it safe”, to protect his lead on the race’s final climbing test.
"It was a hard climb, but actually it was quite short, and it was not super steep, but with the wind coming from the ocean, it made it quite difficult," Yates said. "So I decided to play it a little bit safe, keep the pace quite high and just do my pace, and then I knew it would be difficult for the other guys to attack, so I'm happy to finish it off.
Having trained as a journalist at Cardiff University I spent eight years working as a business journalist covering everything from social care, to construction to the legal profession and riding my bike at the weekends and evenings. When a friend told me Cycling Weekly was looking for a news editor, I didn't give myself much chance of landing the role, but I did and joined the publication in 2016. Since then I've covered Tours de France, World Championships, hour records, spring classics and races in the Middle East. On top of that, since becoming features editor in 2017 I've also been lucky enough to get myself sent to ride my bike for magazine pieces in Portugal and across the UK. They've all been fun but I have an enduring passion for covering the national track championships. It might not be the most glamorous but it's got a real community feeling to it.
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