Sepp Kuss couldn’t be more different to Jumbo-Visma’s other two Grand Tour winners this year. While it was delightful to see a smiling, stress-free Primož Roglič liberated from Tour de France pressures and riding to the Giro d’Italia victory (even if it meant heartbreak for Geraint Thomas) and impressive to watch Jonas Vingegaard’s almost clinical execution of his Tour de France defence, Kuss was the people’s champion at the Vuelta a España.
His win is one for everyone who works hard, is always dependable, and slaves outside of the spotlight while the bosses take all the credit.
Sepp Kuss winning the Vuelta has the feeling of a surprise birthday party thrown by all your besties, during which you find a long-lost Powerball ticket under the sofa cushion that turns out to be a jackpot winner at the same time you are reunited with the dog who went missing three years ago and everyone’s crying tears of joy.
The last time an American won the Spanish Grand Tour, it was very different. Chris Horner was 41 when he won the Vuelta, and rather than inspire hope, Horner couldn’t even get a job after that flawless ride. Fans whose emotional wounds were still fresh from Lance Armstrong’s doping confession nine months earlier were unimpressed by his self-released biological passport data and unconvinced when Horner insisted he ‘wasn’t rider 15’ in the USADA case.
There has been a lot of baggage attached to American cycling, burdens that riders like Taylor Phinney and Tejay van Garderen opted out of shouldering and left the sport prematurely.
Jumbo-Visma smashing everyone in the Giro, Tour and Vuelta in one year and sweeping the podium in Spain is unprecedented, and there will undoubtedly be questions to answer and suspicions to address.
But Kuss demonstrated his talents at a young age, rose steadily through the ranks, was already considered one of the best climbers in the business, and practically won the Vuelta by accident.
Maybe, just maybe, the coast is clear enough now for the US to have another Grand Tour rider to believe in.
Such a rider would have to possess a unique combination of qualities to win the hearts of cycling fans around the world, and Kuss has all of them.
Everyone who saw the 2018 Tour of Utah knew that Sepp Kuss had the potential to be a Grand Tour contender, but once he went off to Andorra and devoted himself to life as a super-domestique, he’s flown mostly under the radar.
All that changed on August 31 when Kuss won the stage to the Observatorio…
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