Ever since Tadej Pogačar won the Tour de France, his subsequent decision to turn down the chance to go for his fourth Grand Tour victory in two seasons and tackle the Vuelta a España has logically dominated a lot of the summer cycling headlines.
However, the most notable development year-on-year in the 2025 Vuelta is not Pogačar’s absence. Rather, it’s that another Slovenian star, present every year in the Vuelta since 2019, winning four of them and taking third in another, will this time be missing from the Vuelta’s Turin start on Saturday, August 23.
Albeit in a much less high-profile Grand Tour, the power vacuum left by Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) is still almost as important as if, for example, Pogačar were to announce he wasn’t doing the Tour de France one year.
It’s not only that Roglič’s current Vuelta victory tally is an equal all-time best with Spain’s Roberto Heras. In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that he is the greatest all-time GC Vuelta rider, given that to date he has five more stage wins – 15 to 10 – than Heras and globally has spent six more days in the leader’s jersey as well. That’s even before we get to the question of Heras only being definitively confirmed the winner of the 2005 Vuelta after a lengthy court battle, too.
Yet, after doing both Giro and Tour, it was all but a given that, for the first time since 2020, the tried-and-tested narrative of Roglič’s Vuelta comebacks after a Tour de France disaster or major setback would be lacking this year.
Even in the 2024 Vuelta, where both he and Red Bull played down his chances of success following his battle against Tour de France injuries and a near last-minute addition to the line-up, it says a lot about Roglič’s status in the Vuelta that he remained the number one favourite all the same. And three weeks later, when he claimed his fourth title in Madrid, he’d definitely done more than enough to justify it.
Yet in all the fuss about Pogačar’s absence, it’s almost gone unnoticed that Roglič is just one of many familiar pieces in the usual Vuelta jigsaw to be out of action this August.
Enric Mas, Movistar’s four-time podium finisher in 2018, 2021, 2022 and 2024, has had to miss out on his home Grand Tour, too, because of thrombophlebitis. Albeit for a range of different reasons, others not present in Spain this year include the 2016,…
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