In his latest Cyclingnews column, now-retired pro Thomas De Gendt takes us inside the good, the bad and the downright unexpected things that come with the Vuelta a España.
A finisher of 10 editions of the Spanish Grand Tour, De Gendt knows a little something about what makes the Vuelta unique – in good ways and bad.
Read on for De Gendt’s humorous and insightful breakdown of life at the Vuelta a España.
The Good (in no particular order)
1. Calmer than France, better-organised than Italy
One of the main attractions of the Vuelta is it isn’t as stressful as the Tour de France and there’s none of the chaos you get in the Giro d’Italia. The Vuelta is still serious racing, though – even if it’s less serious than the Tour.
2. Getting up at 10am
For somebody like me that has two kids, both of whom need to wake up at 6.30am every morning on a school day, sleeping till 10 in the morning thanks to the Vuelta’s late starts is a real luxury.
3. Warm weather
Most of the time the weather’s good, sometimes a bit too warm, but I can’t recollect that many cold, rainy days on the Vuelta and I rode ten of them in total. OK, there were times in the Pyrenees when I was cold because we had to descend from 2,000 metres altitude to the team buses after a finish, but that was pretty much it.
4. Stage 22
Assuming you’re not ill or injured, the biggest challenge of the Vuelta is motivating yourself to stay through it all when things aren’t going so well. I consider it a great honour to finish a Grand Tour because it’s not easy to stay healthy and motivated for three weeks and you’ll always have a day that you don’t feel like racing.
But if it was always a battle to get through to the final day of any Grand Tour, that’s specially the case in the Vuelta. However, one way round this risk of demotivation is that you promise yourself a nice evening out after the final stage of the race, or as we called it in the peloton: ‘stage 22’.
‘Stage 22’ happens in Madrid, obviously, and it potentially goes on the whole night. We certainly had a few parties there, as most of the time for me the Vuelta was the final goal of the season, so there was…
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