Former Dutch cyclist and now TV commentator Laurens Ten Dam shared a series of revealing secrets from within the UAE team that confirm that Juan Ayuso is right when he said the team “is under a dictatorship.” According to what he’s been told, “it’s true that the Spanish cyclist suffered harassment in the UAE, a hell of a place.”

According to Laurens ten Dam, the Pogacar-Ayuso relationship raises a particular question about UAE Team Emirates-XRG: “Is Tadej Pogacar more important than the team? Nobody should be more important than the team, but from what I’m told at UAE, Tadej is the big boss for everything.”

The former Dutch cyclist points to a key moment in which Pogacar’s lack of respect for Ayuso was evident: “This goes back to last spring’s Giro d’Italia, where UAE Team Emirates-XRG started with Juan Ayuso, Adam Yates and Isaac del Toro as leaders. The former was usually the team leader, but del Toro took the leader’s jersey. Pogacar posted a message on Instagram at the time, proclaiming the Mexican as the future of the team that few understood.”

“No one on the team dares to contradict him.”

Ten Dam points out that Pogacar often excludes Ayuso from his high-altitude training camps at a facility like the UAE Team Emirates-XRG. “He doesn’t even want her at the training camps, and apparently, when they’ve met, he laughs with his teammates when Ayuso rides 50 meters ahead of the group during the training camp because they want to reach their full potential.”

The most worrying thing, he adds, is that no one on the team dares to do anything about it: “Everyone on the team thinks: I’m going to support Pogi, because otherwise, I won’t be able to compete anymore. No one on the team is going to say to Pogi: ‘Well, Tadej, it’s not right to say on Instagram that Del Toro is the leader.’ A team manager is not going to say that either. Pogi is becoming bigger than the UAE, and that’s a recipe for disaster.”
In teams where there are multiple stars, everything eventually explodes. An example was what happened at Visma after the 2023 Vuelta a España: “Roglic didn’t agree to give the race to Kuss and work as a domestique for him. At the end of the year, he left, because Roglic isn’t more important than the team. Roglic left gracefully, but in the UAE, things have become a disaster. At Visma, it wasn’t a contentious divorce, while this has been going on for months with Ayuso in the UAE. It’s become a soap opera. We’re enjoying it, but the management is terrible.”