Oh, what could have been. Seven categorised climbs, more than 5,000m of elevation gain, and three teammates of the race leader abandoning (reportedly but unconfirmed due to an outbreak of salmonella): stage 20 of the Vuelta a España had all the ingredients for a spectacular showdown to reorder the podium and potentially dethrone Primož Roglič at the summit of the general classification, just a day after he regained his red jersey. But no.
Though Roglič lost Dani Martínez, Nico Denz and Patrick Gamper at different intervals during the 172km expedition from the verdant and remote Cantabria to Picón Blanco in Burgos, neither of his rivals put in a serious attack, and no-one bothered to test if he too was feeling 100% despite a virus evidently sweeping through his team. Instead, the stage went exactly how Roglič would have wanted it to: another team doing the chasing all day, the GC group arriving en masse to the finish together, and his lead marginally increasing, from 1:54 to 2:02 to Ben O’Connor who remains in second.
Rather than being treated to a penultimate day extravaganza, what was on display was puro ciclismo español. In the name of Landismo, a last-ditch attempt to boomerang the eulogised-yet-ridiculed Mikel Landa back up the GC after he lost time earlier in the week, T-Rex Quick-Step manned the front of the peloton all day. The breakaway never stood a chance, and at some point Landa would attack. And attack he did, 36km from the finish. But, like ever, no one really took any notice and he was brought back into the fold. And then with 500m remaining, he went again, a blistering move that was… you know the story by now. He blew up and lost time.
Then to his fellow compatriot and former teammate, Marc Soler. The Catalan has been one of the race’s stars, perhaps the star. Certainly the roadside fan’s favourite. Liberated by UAE Team Emirates’s realistic GC ambitions fading with the abandonment of João Almeida in the first week, Soler has been in the break in seven of the last 12 stages, out the front for 963km, scooping a hat-trick of third places and finally a win at Lagos de Covadonga. But though he’s been sporting the white jersey of UAE since 2022, Soler still has Movistar tendencies running through his veins. In the mountain leader’s jersey, he and UAE teammate Jay Vine embarked on an amicable-looking civil war to decide who’d be the ultimate KOM winner, Soler going solo twice to claim maximum points,…