UAE Team Emirates rarely make transfer errors. They cherry-pick the best young talent, convert domestiques into super domestiques, and revitalise the career of general classification riders. But by not renewing Marc Hirschi’s contract and letting him join Tudor Pro Cycling from next season, have the Emirati team uncharacteristically made a big mistake?
With a home World Championships just days away, the 26-year-old Swiss is in the richest form of his career, winning five one-day races in a row. It warrants repeating: five. And they’ve not been easy races to win. First, there was the Clásica San Sebastián followed by the Bretagne Classic, two hilly WorldTour events notoriously difficult to control, and then there were three victories at the quartet of September Italian races, the prelude to October’s bigger autumnal Classics. Across the whole season, Hirschi has won six single-day events and, according to Velon’s Road Code rankings, is closing in on becoming the season’s best-ranked one-day rider.
After a few years of stuttering form, Hirschi is once again showing the same potency and tactical nous as he did in the autumn of 2020, when as a largely unknown 22-year-old he spectacularly broke onto the scene by winning a stage of the Tour de France, La Flèche Wallonne and finishing on the podium of both the World Championships and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. It was that run of form that prompted an acrimonious switch from DSM to UAE.
Since then, though, Hirschi hasn’t hit the heights expected of him. He’s still won – 20 wins across his four years with the team – but none were at WorldTour level until San Sebastián, and he’s only ridden two Grand Tours with them, appearing in the 2021 and 2022 Tours de France in support of Tadej Pogačar. Hip injuries have affected him, but it’s notable how he’s become a Grand Tour outcast for UAE, relegated to smaller stage races (of which he’s won three) and one-day events.
In some sense, it’s not a surprise therefore that Hirschi wanted to up sticks and move. It’s no coincidence, too, that he opted for Tudor, even if they are a second-division team likely to be reliant on wildcards to gain access to Grand Tours in the forthcoming years. That’s because Tudor is the team of Swiss great Fabian Cancellara, who also happens to double as Hirschi’s manager. The sales pitch would have been quite predictable: join my team, Marc, and become our leader (we’ll pretend Spartacus didn’t say the same thing to Julian Alaphilippe). Approaching the supposed best years of his career, and being the big dog at an ambitious team who’d buy a spot in the WorldTour if they could, everything is set for a perfect Hirschi and Tudor marriage.
So have UAE got it wrong in sanctioning Hirschi’s departure? Completing cycling by winning every race once with Pogačar is the team’s obvious and understandable priority, but they still need other riders to chip in with their own results. At present, they have that in spades – 73 wins and counting already this season, comfortably their greatest ever – but in letting Hirschi leave, they’re losing a very regular and reliable winner, one who triumphs on a variety of terrain. The state of UAE and the airline Emirates might not covet the limited attention that winning the Czech Tour brings, but good publicity is good publicity regardless of how many eyeballs notice.
In the eight years since the Gulf nation took over the licence of Lampre-Merida, it could be argued that they have made only three major transfer errors, showing Matej Mohorič, Filippo Ganna and Jasper Philipsen the exit door. In that time, they’ve promoted Pogačar and Juan Ayuso from their feeder teams, tempted the next best in Isaac Del Toro and Jan Christen to their project, and turned promise into the real deal with Brandon McNulty and João Almeida. They’ve even given much-needed impetus to stagnating riders like Marc Soler and Adam Yates. In short, UAE’s transfer policy, with the odd exemption, has been a complete success. But as Philipsen’s transfer to Alpecin-Deceuninck in 2021 showed, UAE don’t always get it right.
Given his current form, there’s a very real prospect of Hirschi upstaging Pogačar and winning the World Championships in Zurich at the end of the month, a scenario that would delight Tudor but embarrass UAE. Will the sport’s best team regret casting aside a proven winner? And fully supported as Tudor’s number one rider, will Hirschi haunt UAE in the coming years?
