Tim Wellens to lead UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s title defence at the CRO Race

On the eve of the 11th edition, UAE Team Emirates-XRG is pleased to announce its seven-man lineup for the upcoming CRO Race. The Emirati squad will look to win the overall title for the third season in a row and will start this year’s race as defending champions.

Running from Tuesday, 22 September through to Sunday, 27 September, the CRO Race is a six-day stage race that takes place in the European nation of Croatia.

UAE Team Emirates-XRG will be at the start line in Split for the third consecutive year, and will be guided by Sports Directors Andrej Hauptman and Jan Polanc. Polanc placed fifth overall at this race back in 2017, in UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s debut season on the road.

That edition proved to be rather fruitful for the Emirati outfit, yielding three stage victories. The team has since added a further three stage wins, alongside the overall title through Brandon McNulty in 2024 and 2025.

The American will be in Montréal for the UCI World Road Race Championships, but in his place, Tim Wellens will look to lead the general classification push for the team. In Croatia, the Belgian will be joined by the Colombian sprinter Sebastián Molano, who was a stage winner here in 2024.

Having recently claimed the general classification at the Tour of Britain, Wellens head into the CRO Race with plenty of ambition.

Wellens: “This will be my second participation at the CRO Race. I have good memories from last year when Brandon McNulty took the overall win, and as defending champions we know we will have expectations to perform.

“My overall shape is very good, and so I would like to try and go for the general classification. Perhaps the steep climb where Brandon took the win last year may be right on the limit of my capabilities, but we will try for it. We have Molano here for the sprints also, so we will aim to be competitive on each day.”

Alongside Wellens and Molano, the UAE Team Emirates-XRG lineup will contain Luca Giaimi, Julius Johansen, Domen Novak, Rui Oliveira, and Nils Politt. The latter was a stage winner at the Tour of Britain just weeks ago.

With this strong outfit, the team will look to race on the front foot from Split to Zagreb, with stage finishes planned for Seget, Novalja, Labin, Rijeka, and Sv. Nedelja along the way. Clocking in at a little under 1000km in length, the 11th edition of the CRO Race will take the peloton from the Adriatic coastline to the inner metropolitan areas of the country.

It all begins on Tuesday, 22 September, with an undulating route that links Split to Seget. Heading along the Dalmatian coast, stage 1 is 167.4km long and features a pair of category two climbs late in the day.

The latter of these tests, at Kovačevići, will be crested with around 21km to ride to the finish. It should prove an opportunity for the versatile sprinters to take the first leader’s jersey of the race.

All the sprinters will have their eyes on the 114.5km stage between Biograd na Moru and Novalja on stage 2, with little climbing to be done before a flat run-in to the finish on the Croatian island of Pag.

From the short to the severe, stage 3 will be the longest stage of the week, clocking in at 174.3km from Krk to Labin. On paper, it appears to be the toughest day of the race, with 3,303m of climbing to be tackled in the Istrian peninsula.

The main feature of stage 3 will be the category one Skitača climb (3.5km at 10.8%). The summit of this will fall 21.5km from the finish, which in itself comes at the end of a 2km-long uphill kick to the line. Expect the general classification contenders to do battle across this terrain.

On Friday, stage 4 will have the peloton ride from Pula to the bustling port city of Rijeka. This route includes the toughest climb of the week, the hors catégorie Učka (10.5km at 7.5%), but the summit will be reached with 53km yet to ride to the finish. It will be up to the riders as to how decisive the steep climb will prove.

Stage 5 is another intriguing affair, with 164.3km and 2,345m of climbing linking Karlovac in the Adriatic to Sveta Nedelja in continental Croatia. Once more, a pair of category two climbs in the finale should make things interesting, with the latter Plešivica ascent topping out just 16km from the finish.

To end the 2026 CRO Race, stage 6 will start in Samobor and end in the Croatian capital of Zagreb on Sunday afternoon. This is the traditional curtain call for the race, proving the flattest stage of the week and ending with two laps of a city circuit. Here, the sprinters will have their last opportunity to leave Croatia with a win on their palmarès.