So, they should sign 30 leaders and best prospects from each generation.
Then don't complain that UAE wins a lot of races because they sign 30 riders who have the level to be leaders.
For a rider they sign to be a domestique in lower-level races, you have to see strange things.
He's this year's Vink. A lower-level domestique for lower-level races.
Visma and BORA have several lower-level riders to complete the team. UAE barely has any. The worst riders on their team are either very young or riders like Soler, who won Paris-Nice and GT stages with their previous team. That's the worst riders they have besides Julius
For UAE, for one incapable of winning they have, it seems strange to you. But if instead of Julius, they put the best Junior capable of winning as a domestique in Abruzzo and Austria, the complaint would be because they're monopolizing all the talent to have them as domestiquesin minor races LOL.
You don't conform for anything
The oddness is not in that they signed a domestique type, it's the source and the direction of travel. He had been a fairly nondescript WT pro for a couple of years with Intermarché and while he was still young enough to feasibly be improving, not even getting a contract for 2024 and then signing mid-March for a Portuguese team (a scene which has a very bad reputation iro Clinic matters) with whom he did a fairly short calendar meant that it was a very off-the-wall pick for UAE, because lots of riders with better backgrounds and histories have ended up in that scene and not made it out, and getting results in the Portuguese scene on one of the domestic teams is often viewed with a great deal of suspicion. For the most part riders who make it out of the Portuguese domestic péloton to the top two tiers have largely only done so by getting to ProTeams, and usually relatively local ones (Caja Rural, Burgos, Delko), so jumping to not just a WT team but one of the very top WT teams is eye-catching, if just for the fact that for the role they want to utilise him for, there are numerous options that offer similar upside without the stigma or negative perception that comes from dumpster-diving a scene with a very bad reputation. I thought it was weird enough that he signed into that scene in the first place, let alone that he got out again.
The team does, however, have a sizable Portuguese presence, with four Portuguese riders (Almeida, Morgado and the two Oliveira twins), and back in the late 00s-early 10s Lampre, their predecessors, were just about the only ProTour team that would ride the Volta a Portugal owing to having a sponsor with commitments in the Portuguese market, so it may just be that they have more eyes on that scene than others. And indeed they may have seen something they liked in Johansen that he wasn't being used for at the time or had not been used for at Intermarché. A good example of this would be how Christian Knees was a middling Classics guy riding for his own goals at Milram, but when that team collapsed he was effectively picked up off waivers early season by Sky, but then he was repurposed as a flat stage domestique and became one of the best in the business in that role.
The comparison made to Sky is more for some of their odder pickups - there have been a few perplexing choices of rider signings by big teams over the years, but usually there's a clear logic that can be found, for example Movistar signing Spanish track riders like Eloy Teruel on a one-off flyer, or Carlos Oyarzún after overperforming at the World Championships and the new sponsors wanting more diverse South American presence on the team; UAE carrying Yousif Mirza or Bahrain carrying Ahmed Madan on their rosters as sops to the sponsors; or Lars Petter Nordhaug signing for day one Sky from the third tier Team Joker in Norway because he was friends with Edvald Boasson Hagen and got good results in the Tour of Britain, so he was available to negotiate with and it made it easier for the team to bring a bigger name on board. There's a good chance that Johansen may fall into one of these categories. Certainly it seems more likely than him bringing the sponsorship money with him, like Alexis Vuillermoz or some of the ProTeam level pay-riders, because if that was the case he wouldn't have dropped down to Portugal in the first place.
But for those transfers, there's some bigger headscratchers: Cameron Wurf to Ineos as a 36-year-old who had been out of the pro péloton for six years and barely held on to WT standard before that? Gabriel Rasch to FDJ at 35 and Sky at 36, after not turning pro until 30 and only being signed to keep Thor Hushovd company for several years before that? Bruno Pires to Leopard at 29 and then to Saxo at 30 after being a fairly mediocre climbing helper in the domestic Portuguese scene for a decade and getting embroiled in the LA-MSS fiasco? Joaquin Novoa, Dan Lloyd and Dan Fleeman all getting their one shot at the big time in their mid-to-late 20s with Cervélo? Sometimes these signings pay off - Rory Sutherland getting promoted to a WT-level domestique after half a decade as a Continental-level pro before spending a decade as a reliable hand at the top level, for example - but often they appear confusing, not because the rider is necessarily undeserving of a spot but precisely because of the interchangeability of their role and that there are so many other names in the hat that you sometimes wonder 'why him in particular?' - often there's a sponsor, agent or personal connection involved, but if it's not surface-level obvious (such as, say, Jesús Hernández and Benjamin Noval with Contador, Volodymyr Bileka with Popovych, Nordhaug with Boasson Hagen or Rasch with Hushovd) it tends to raise eyebrows, and Johansen's just the latest such example - far from the first and will be far from the last either.
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