To all potential aspirants for winning a major mountain stage of the Vuelta a España like Sepp Kuss (Jumbo-Visma) did at the Javalambre summit finish this Thursday, here’s one key piece of advice: don’t move house after the Tour de France.
That’s what Kuss did in 2022, and as the North American recounted after taking his second Vuelta summit finish victory and third Grand Tour win of his career, it did no good at all to his chances of preparing properly for the Spanish race last year, which he abandoned after a week after falling ill.
Asked if the 2023 victory constituted a kind of sporting revenge for his difficult Vuelta last year, Kuss told reporters it partly did, but also recounted that his ill-timed house move and sickness had been what had spurred him to “focus on the basics”, before the 2023 Vuelta a España – his third Grand Tour of the season after helping Primož Roglič to victory in the Giro d’Italia and Jonas Vingegaard at the Tour de France.
That strategy certainly seemed to pay off brilliantly on Thursday, as Kuss soared away from the remnants of a massive breakaway some four kilometres from the line to take a hugely-impressive solo win and come within seconds of taking the overall lead.
“It was an incredibly hard stage, we wanted to try to go in the breakaway just to test QuickStep and we knew it would be a hard day to control,” Kuss said.
“That was the primary objective and we were in there with Dylan [Van Baarle], Jan [Tratnik] and Attila [Valter], and they rode super-good. I have to thank them a lot for the work they did. The whole day I felt super, super good.”
As for his own strategy, he said, “I was only thinking about when to go and when to try to make the difference. The whole way up the climb, I was just enjoying the environment we have in the Vuelta, it’s always a special race for me.”
Taking such an important win at Javalambre was in contrast to his ill-fated 2022 participation, which began to skew when he got overly involved in moving house after the Tour de France last summer, he said.
“At the time it didn’t seem so difficult, but I spent two weeks doing projects around the house, and everything that goes with moving, so I didn’t have the time properly recover from the Tour. Then at the Vuelta I got very sick after 7 or 9 stages,” leading to his abandon.
This time around was a very different story, he said. “I tried to recover as well as possible after I did the Tour and focus on the basics,…
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