As the Vuelta a San Juan broke for its rest day on Thursday, Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) and his main rivals were all still locked on more or less the same time. As expected, the absence of a time trial on this year’s route means that the general classification will hinge almost entirely on stage 5, when the race scales the desolate, windswept slopes of the Alto del Colorado, perched some 2,624 metres above sea level.
Aside from a time bonus here – Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) and Quinn Simmons (Trek-Segafredo) – or a time penalty there (Simmons again), the pre-race favourites have remained largely in step throughout the opening four days.
“The GC has not moved at all except for some guys who got fines and took some time,” Evenepoel said in Barreal on Wednesday evening. “I think it’s going to be a very open race and that’s the goal of the organisation. Without a TT, they want a very open race in Colorado.”
Yet while the standings have not changed much, it would be remiss to say there hasn’t been movement. The remoteness of the Sierra de Talacasto trumped the practicalities of beaming live television pictures for much of Wednesday’s fourth stage, but word eventually filtered through of a surprising attacker on the category 1 ascent of Gruta Virgen de Andacollo. A year and a day on from the crash that could have ended his life, Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) was back on the offensive in a bike race.
The information reaching the sala de prensa at the finish in Barreal was patchy – the initial list of escapees, for instance, included a rider who had abandoned the race that morning – but a distant helicopter shot eventually provided more reliable evidence that Bernal was indeed at the head of the race.
The time gaps were still obscure, as was the precise sequence of events, but that scarcely seemed to matter. For most of its history, cycling has been a sport more imagined than witnessed. In this age of incessant streaming and instant information, there’s no harm in turning back the clock a little every now and then, restoring a little of the mystery of old.
Some of the gaps in the narrative were filled in later by photographers who had followed Bernal’s move from the pillion of their motorcycles. The early break had already forged clear ahead of the 2,200-metre-high Gruta Virgen de Andacollo when Bernal decided to test the waters with an acceleration on the climb.
No one was certain precisely how much ground he recouped to…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…