Breaking news that’s not so breaking news, rather an affirmation of what we’ve known for two weeks: the Vuelta a España is drunk. Off its rocker. Bladdered. As drunk as the hundreds of thousands of people taking part in the various fiestas del pueblo around the country right now, only without the bulls, paella and tinto de verano. It’s completely unhinged, doing things that only drunken people do at 5am in the morning, making incoherent and unpredictable decisions.
Someone, someone out there, wherever you may be, please explain how a stage with 2,900m of climbing, and a category one climb 17km from the end – a puerto that climbs 834m over 14km – ended in a bunch sprint between the race’s fastest riders. How? Why? No entiendo nada. It makes no sense. But somehow, Alpecin-Deceuninck’s Kaden Groves bested Visma-Lease a Bike’s Wout van Aert in Villablino, scoring his sixth Vuelta stage win. We’ll celebrate the Australian in a moment and commend him on his yearly consistency in the Grand Tour that is so unfavourable to sprinters, but first we need to answer the cómo. How was this possible?
There are, despite the bafflement, reasons. Principal among them being that this is the Vuelta. It has a long history of not subscribing to convention and throwing up surprises. Just look at what has preceded this stage: the race’s outstanding favourite Primož Roglič bizarrely thought it was a sensible idea to give Ben O’Connor a near-five minute lead in the red jersey, and still, with a week to go, has work to do to prevent the Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale rider from winning the race. Even aside from that rather big race-altering move, the leader of the green jersey is now also comfortably the leader of the polka dot jersey. Yup, you read that right. The best sprinter is also the best climber. It makes a bit more sense when you learn it’s the do-it-all Van Aert at the top of both classifications, but still, come on. Que locura. What madness. We could go on, but we’ll spare you. You already know the Vuelta is manic.
And so stage 14. How could such a mountainous stage end in a sprint? The most plausible reason is how the stages have been designed, which is to say, the Vuelta, like every year, got too excited and just couldn’t resist sending the peloton down a newly-found goat track or throwing in one extra mountain-top finish. All four stages before Monday’s rest day are being held in the high mountains, with Thursday, Friday and Sunday finishing on a climb. Those at the front of the peloton, despite wishes of the armchair fans, cannot chase down stage results and look for time gaps every single day. With fatigue playing its part, and other days posing greater opportunities to create maximum differences, Roglič, Enric Mas, Richard Carapaz and Co., the main challenges to O’Connor, have to carefully select which days they’ll attack. Stage 14 ending with a long downhill was unlikely to produce the desired big time gaps.
Of course, it’s highly unlikely that this would have happened in the Tour de France where the allure of a stage win is so great that at least one rider would have attacked over the top of the final climb. But this is the Vuelta. It’s not the Tour. The playbook is different here. Aware of that was Van Aert who instructed his team to keep the breakaway in check with a fourth stage win in mind. Similarly conscious and ready to prevent the Belgian was Groves. Now riding his third consecutive Vuelta, the Australian is accustomed to the intricacies (code: weirdness) and mood of the race. He can feel when it’s not game for playing by typical norms, and he’s a good enough climber to get over the hardest of climbs when the leading GC guys are taking it rather easy.
