Blazin' Saddles: How to solve a problem like Marcel?

It's not often that Eurosport can get away with producing the same headline for a totally different cycling story. Sure, in recent years we have seen two incidences of 'Froome wins Tour de France as Greipel takes final stage on Champs-Elysees' plus there has presumably been a few variants of 'Kristoff wins Tour de Fjords opener', not to mention 'Wiggins lays into former team at launch party'.

But last year, less than six months ago, Blazin' Saddles led with the very same question as the headline on this here piece during the Tour de France: How to solve a problem like Marcel?

Back during a 2017 Tour front-loaded with bunch sprints, the problem wasn't so much for Marcel to solve but rather for those nonplussed rivals trying to beat him: after notching a fifth win out of six sprints, Kittel was indeed zipping along as if blessed with the sound of music.

Judging by the Von Clap-Trapp of a season he's had thus far, though, Kittel would be better off studying to become a nun in Salzburg or taking up a post as governess to the seven children of a retired naval officer in the Alps rather than try to win a bunch sprint.

Since the winter transfer merry-go-round – which saw Kittel replace Alexander Kristoff at Katusha-Alpecin and Elia Viviani fill the German's void at Quick-Step Floors – it's become clearer than Team Sky's new kit who has got the better end of the deal. You don't need a drunken Damon Albarn telling you as it is to realise that an isolated Kittel is performing about as well as Teresa May in Brussels right now.

In five stages in Dubai, Kittel cracked the top five just the once, while before Friday's third stage in Abu Dhabi he'd dropped like a stone through water every time the going got tough.

Just take a look at the finale of stage 2 in Abu Dhabi, for instance. Katusha-Alpecin had five riders around Kittel with 5km remaining and still managed to make a hash of things. By the time Quick-Step came to the front with four men alongside Viviani with one kilometre to go, Katusha had blown all their matches and Kittel had dropped far back in the leading pack.

With Kittel's old lead-out man Fabio Sabatini now doing the honours for Dubai winner Viviani, Kittel slipped further back – and when the Italian took yet another convincing win, Kittel was freewheeling home for 82nd place. It was an utter shambles.

This time a year ago, Kittel won the corresponding stage in Abu Dhabi off the back of three wins in Dubai, where he also took the overall classification. Elia Viviani, it seems, is proving quite the like-for-like replacement.

Herein lies the problem. At Team Sky, where Viviani was merely applying the batter to the other more important fish to be fried, the Italian was never really given the support he deserved. At Quick-Step, however, he has inherited a dedicated sprint train of undisputed quality. Matteo Trentin, Jack Bauer and Julien Vermote may have gone, but the Belgian team is still the best in the business at delivering their fast men to the line.

Britain's James Knox, Colombian Alvaro Hodeg and Denmark's Michael Morkov have all filled the gaps, while Sabatini remains the pilot of choice for the Plan A sprinter. Imagine adding Fernando Gaviria to the mix: this is a team that can, once again, deliver with different riders across all stage races – and let's not even get started about the classics.

Katusha-Alpecin, on the other hand, are more of a work in progress than Elise Christie. Not only do they have a new lead sprinter, but they have new train to bed in, what with the likes of Alex Dowsett and Ian Boswell joining over the winter.

With riders of the calibre of Tony Martin, Nils Politt, Tiago Machado, Marco Haller and Rick Zabel at their disposal, it's hard to imagine that the team's travails will continue. But Kittel is a confidence sprinter, and if he gets it into his head that this is not going to be his year, then it probably won't be his year and Katusha might as well give him the kind of sabbatical he enjoyed in 2015.

For Kittel is no stranger to dips in form and confidence, that much we know. He may have won four stages in his breakthrough Tour in 2013 and followed that up one year later – but that 2014 season at Giant-Shimano was not without its troubles.

It was also followed by a miserable 2015 during which Kittel won just the single race – in the Tour of Poland – and didn't even enter any of the Grand Tours.

But the German relocated his mojo at Quick-Step, winning at the Giro (twice) and Tour in 2016 before excelling with five wins at the Tour in 2017.

And yet, since his stage 11 scalp in Pau, Kittel, who crashed out of that Tour in green, has not returned to the top of a podium. To put that into context, in the same time period a relatively out-of-sorts Kristoff has notched five wins, Peter Sagan and Caleb Ewan six, Viviani 10 and ageing compatriot Andre Greipel even has three.

Perhaps only Mark Cavendish is suffering from a more worrying – albeit injury-related – blip. Having dazzled himself on the 2016 Tour, Cavendish crashed out of the race one year later and has been on the ropes ever since.

Victory in stage 3 of the Dubai Tour earlier this month already matched his tally of wins from last season – but the Manxman was unable to build on his early season success in Abu Dhabi thanks to a freak incident in the neutralized zone ahead of the Abu Dhabi opener on Wednesday.

An automatic brake sensor in the race director's car was apparently to blame as Cavendish went down and was forced out with whiplash and suspected concussion.

("The car braked by itself," RCS Sport race director Stefano Allocchio later confirmed. "Unfortunately, these are things that happen. This evening, we'll have a technician deactivate it on the all the cars because we don't want to risk it happening again." Quite why it takes a technician to flip a switch is anyone's guess…)

Back to the former flat-track bully Kittel and it's worth remembering that things change fast in cycling. This time last week, the focus was on the failure of local team UAE-Emirates to pick up a win so far this season; Kristoff has since won two – the final stage in Oman and the Abu Dhabi curtain-raiser.

Kristoff's brace meant Team Sunweb were momentarily the only WorldTour outfit to stand atop the podium this season – and at the rate things were going, their designer sprinter Phil Bauhaus seemed to have more of a chance of stemming the drought than his compatriot Kittel.

And so it proved on Friday, with Bauhaus leading a German one-two-three ahead of a revitalised Kittel and the promising Pascal Ackermann of Bora-Hansgrohe – pushing the likes of Viviani, Ewan, Greipel and Kristoff out of the picture.

So, how do you solve a problem like Marcel? Probably with a bit of patience and an absence of sensationalism. We are, after all, merely a month or so into the new season. Some riders – Michael Matthews, for instance – have not even put on their racing shoes yet.

Indeed, speaking to Eurosport from Mitchelton-Scott's training camp in Almeria last week, Ewan stressed that it was way too early to make any conclusions about the early-season form of his rivals.

"It's always interesting to see how some of the different sprinters adapt to their new teams," the 23-year-old said one day after picking up his second win of the season at the Clasica de Almeria.

With reference to Kittel's apparent struggle to swap the blue of Quick-Step for the red of Katusha, and Kristoff's now-forgotten early difficulties for UAE, Ewan added: "It's hard to see straight away because, obviously, you can't go to a team and expect the lead-out to be perfect straight away.

We'll probably never know if Kittel's so-called struggles come down to the rider going too hard in the winter or if he's merely easing himself into contention in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But judging by the way he fought back through the field in Friday's third stage, it's way too early to be writing off Kittel just yet.

His best finish of the season will be a huge confidence boost for the man previously known as Mighty Marcel. The way Kittel accelerated and weaved his way through the pack shows that, on his day, the towering German still has the speed in his legs and a clear racer's instinct.

At 29 and supposedly hitting his peak years, Kittel cannot afford another season like his 2015. He more than anyone will be aware of that. The competition in the sprints is getting fiercer every year and it's sink or swim time. Friday's showing suggests that Kittel isn't quite ready to channel Leo DiCaprio and do a Jack in Titanic.

You're only as good as your previous result – and a win before the end of the week in Abu Dhabi could well turn the tables and render this whole discussion void. Perhaps his rivals will be trying to solve a problem like Marcel come the business part of the season after all.