What the Vuelta a España might lack in Grand Tour status it is surely making up for in difficulty this year, ensuring that this three weeks is no late-season phone-in for riders looking to tune up for the Road World Championships.
What amounts to very nearly the first half of the race has thrown up some fine days of racing as the breakaways attempt to capitalise on the hilly stages and the sprinters go all-out where they can. Even the GC race, slow-burning at first, has yielded its first surprises and big battles.
Tom Pidcock really is going for the GC
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Tom Pidcock‘s announcement that he would be riding for the general classification at this year’s Vuelta was met with a certain degree of dubiousness. After all, we had seen and heard this before at the Tour de France, where things didn’t exactly pan out as intended.
But that was a different time, and a different team. Pidcock certainly seems happier since he left Ineos Grenadiers for Q36.5 Pro Cycling and the effect of that was perhaps what we saw in his riding on Sunday’s ninth stage to Valdezcaray.
Up until then Pidcock had stayed quiet, chipping away with top 10s and top 20s on the days that mattered. But on stage nine he came out to play. Despite losing 24 seconds to stage winner Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) in the final count-up, Pidcock, together with Joāo Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) dropped the rest of the GC contenders to the tune of 38 seconds.
The 26-year-old ended the stage fourth on GC, and while there is a huge amount of hard riding still to do in this race, he had issued a major statement and climbed to the highest position he has ever known in a Grand Tour.
UAE Team Emirates-XRG looking good – but is ‘good’ enough?
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According to the form book, the most concerted attempt to upset favourite Jonas Vingegaard‘s victory plans was going to come from UAE Team Emirates-XRG.
UAE’s two-pronged attack started out with a pair of riders that have both been knocking on the door of a Grand Tour victory for a few years now in the form of Joāo Almeida and home rider Juan Ayuso.
As we now know, it is unlikely to be Ayuso’s race – a bad day saw him finish nearly 12 minutes down on stage six to Pal. Andorra. While he bounced back to win the following day’s stage to Cerler. Huesca La Magia, his performances over the weekend saw him finish well down on both days and surrender further GC placings.
Almeida on the other hand has ridden a solid race, shadowing Vingegaard everywhere he needed shadowing – until yesterday, when he lost 24 seconds.
He is now 38 seconds in arrears on GC to the Dane, and still within shouting distance with a lot of very tough racing left.
Vingegaard looks the strongest – so far
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Coming into the Vuelta, few were in disagreement: Jonas Vingegaard was, and remains, the outright favourite to win on GC.
Yes, he lost the Tour de France to Tadej Pogačar. But Tadej Pogačar is not here, and when it comes to Grand Tour riding, few can hold a candle to the Pogačar-Vingegaard duality anyway.
Vingegaard had even professed to have seen his best ever power figures at the Tour, which won’t have filled his Vuelta rivals with confidence.
However, the Dane built his season around the Tour, not the Vuelta, and while such details are unlikely to be unveiled until after the race, his numbers in Spain could easily be down on those from the Tour.
However, so far Vingegaard has been solid throughout, and based on his performance – and his team’s – at Valdezcaray though, the Dane still appears to be the strongest rider in the race, and with the strongest riders around him.
That is, at least for now. This Vuelta is one of the hardest Grand Tours we’ve ever seen, and there is so much hard racing still to come. Can he keep it up all the way to Madrid?
Points but no wins yet for Pedersen
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The make-up of the stages in this first week have been a good gauge of what the Vuelta looks like overall – that is, mountains-heavy.
The sprinters present are going to need to take any and every chance presented to them, and there are not going to be many.
Jasper Philipsen has so far proven to be the best at this, with his stage one victory rewarded with the bonus of the red leader’s jersey, and netting a second stage win at the weekend on stage eight.
Despite being arguably more versatile, Philipsen’s sprint rival Mads Pedersen has so far not managed this feat, although he came close with a second place at Ceres.
Instead the Dane’s strategy has centred on intermediate sprints, of which he has won two and featured in the points in four.
But with the breakaways often hoovering up all the available points, and Ethan Vernon (IPT), who is second in the points classification, chasing hard behind (and sometimes prevailing), this is not the most surefire way to build out his lead. It is, however, the best option he’s got for most of this very hilly race.
Hello, Giulio Pellizzari
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The young Italian is repaying the faith that the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team put in him when they signed him on a three year contract at the end of last year.
His lead in the young rider classification has not wavered since he took it from Juan Ayuso on stage six (or, perhaps, when Ayuso handed it to him with an emphatic capitulation).
The 21-year-old climber has led USA’s Matthew Riccitello (IPT) by 27 seconds since that fateful Andorra stage and has finished in the top 20 on all the hard mountain stages so far. He currently sits 10th overall.
Already this year he has finished sixth overall at the Giro d’Italia, where he was also second in the young rider competition.
It will be interesting to see how he develops over the next two seasons – but first he has to get through what is likely to be one of the hardest Grand Tours he’ll ever ride.
