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In road cycling it often happens that after hours of running a race is decided with a sprint in the last few metres. Sprints are often won by a matter of centimeters and, more rarely, by millimetres. It happened on Monday at the end of the first of the seven stages of the UAE Tour, the tour of the United Arab Emirates, where the Belgian Tim Merlier and the Australian Caleb Ewan came very close to the finish line. It was Ewan who cheered at first, but after a few minutes of extensive photo-finish review the victory was awarded to Merlier, who is estimated to have won by five millimetres.
Even before the sprint, however, the stage had made itself known. Along a flat route through the desert, some runners had indeed managed to take advantage of the strong side wind to create the so-called fans. In other words, by arranging themselves along the road so as to be partially protected from the lateral wind, some runners had managed to exploit the slipstream of those ahead of them and in the meantime create a gap between them and those following them, so as to take advantage and make it difficult , due to the wind, the return of the pursuers.
(Luca Bettini/SprintCyclingAgency©2023)
After the composition of the various groups changed several times, with some catching up and some remaining behind, at the finish line in Al Mirfa, after 151 kilometers of racing, twelve runners arrived with over a minute ahead of the rest of the group. In a race which, due to its many flat stages, has many sprinters among its participants (some speak of it as a “World of sprinters”) only Merlier and Ewan were left to fight for the victory in the last meters.
(Luca Bettini/SprintCyclingAgency©2023)
Merlier races for Soudal Quick-Step with race number 3 and with the Belgian national champion’s jersey; Ewan runs for Lotto Dstny, whose jersey is red and blue, with race number 13. At the finish line, in a sprint in which they reached a speed of 70 kilometers per hour, both did the so-called final kidney stroke.
One of the most uncertain photo finishes ever ????
Merlier beats Ewan in the 1st stage of the @uae_tour by a breath, or even less… ????#UAETour | #EurosportCICLISMO pic.twitter.com/w3ZzyVNugj
— Eurosport IT (@Eurosport_IT) February 20, 2023
After more than ten minutes of analysis of the photo finish – which according to the regulation of the International Cycling Union must reach at least 3,500 frames per second – the victory was awarded to Merlier. That is, it was established that the front wheel of Merlier’s bicycle (the one at the top in the image below) touched the finish line before that of Ewan’s bicycle, with an advantage less than a millisecond.
Despite ever better technologies, it is not uncommon for road cycling to have such undecided finals. At the Amstel Gold Race, a Dutch road race, happens for two years the finale has been decided at the photo finish (in 2021 with several doubts about the verdict, mostly due to the position of the “photo” and the moment chosen to decide). It has also happened, although it is very rare, that in the impossibility of being able to determine a single winner, the victory of a road cycle race was awarded equally.
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