The UAE is taking a shine to the concept of bicycles. Riding them. Buying them. Watching others ride them, especially professionals.

The issue here is that this country is remarkably flat, most of it. Conditions which generally make for boring races, among cyclists.

The pros? They will get in a huge pack and this or that guy will make a breakaway, then get reeled in by the pack, and the race will be determined by a sprint at the end.

That’s what happens when you don’t have a mountain.

The debut Abu Dhabi Tour begins later this week, and it has one advantage the two editions of the Dubai Tour did not:

A serious mountain climb.

It is called Jebel Hafeet and is just outside Al Ain, the Abu Dhabi city right up against the border with Oman.

Jebel Hafeet comes as a surprise to people who live in the UAE. We can drive around for months, years, and not see a mountain and, all of a sudden, there is this tall outcropping of limestone jutting into the sky.

I wrote about this once before, while visiting Al Ain. We drove up to the top of Jebel Hafeet — about a 4,000-foot climb over a very steep grade, and were more than a little creeped out by it.

(The photo on the blog post linked, above, is taken on the mountain; the text about it is in the final third of the post.)

The average rate of ascent is 8 percent, and it maxes out at 12, which compares surprisingly well with some of the most famous climbs in cycling, including the Alpe d’Huez, Mont Ventoux and the near un-ride-able Angliru, in Spain, with its 24 percent maximum grade.

Pretty much everyone around the Abu Dhabi Tour immediately recognized that this one climb, 11.7 kilometers in length, stood a strong chance of being the decisive moment of the competition.

Thus, we sent our cycling expert, Osman Samiuddin, out to Jebel Hafeet with a photographer to talk to some serious (if not professional) cyclists who were making the climb at 7:30 in the morning — before the heat really took hold.

This is the very niece piece he wrote, for The National, and here is a photo gallery.

Most of the riders made it to the top, generally in about 45 minutes.

The professionals, who include 2014 Tour de France winner Vicenzo Nibali, and rising Slovak rider Peter Sagan, will finish much more quickly than that. Maybe in about 25 minutes.

But Jebel Hafeet will make them work. With the aid of afternoon temperatures of about 100 Fahrenheit, it will make them sweat, too.

And that’s what you want from your professional cyclists. A little suffering. More than a little, if you can help it.