Last chance saloon
Who needs to save their season at La Vuelta?
The fact that the men’s cycling season is still in full-swing despite a hectic month and a half which has contained the Tour de France and the Olympics, and is now onto La Vuelta, is a quirk doesn’t make sense at first glance.
The Tour de France is unquestionably the biggest race in the sport, the race around which the vast majority of professionals base their season. And yet unlike the NFL or baseball or football, once the Tour de France ends the cycling season just keeps on rolling around.
The fact that there is another grand tour, another three-week race, starting right in the middle of the summer holidays and after pretty much every major season objective bar the world championships, is yet another quirk that’s tricky to explain to new fans and outsiders.
That this quirk is actually, in the eyes of the team of one at The Musette, a good thing, is another thing to add to the list of oddities about cycling that need looking over.
Sure, most riders in the professional peloton base their seasons around either the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, or the early-season classics such as Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders. These are cycling’s marquee events and the races most riders most want to win.
But there are three grand tours and the last is the Vuelta a España. It’s still three weeks and still very hard and yet, unless they’re Spanish, few riders enter a cycling season earnestly targeting the win here. Those that do target it are usually up-and-coming contenders who see this as a chance to prove themselves over three weeks, before they target bigger prizes in Italy and France.
So, all of this sounds like the recipe for a boring race, full of also-rans and nearly-men. Thankfully, this isn’t the case.
Few men may target this race in January, but those who have seen their chances at the Giro or the Tour go down the pan thanks to illness or injury all invariably line up at La Vuelta to try and save their seasons.
This is the case again in 2024. Sepp Kuss, the defending champion after his team’s clean sweep of the podium last year, missed the Tour de France with covid. He wasn’t going into the Tour to win it, rather to support Jonas Vingegaard, but he was sorely missed in France and now has a chance to defend his title. This time there will be no Dane hovering in the background.
Like last year Primož Roglič will be, but this time he’s on a different team. Roglič crashed out of this year’s Tour de France. Terrible luck, but the luck that Roglič seems to get while on French soil. He crashes so often on their roads he must be starting to think the whole nation has it in for him. Crashes at the Tour are becoming a regular occurrence, as well as race-losing crashes at Paris-Nice in 2021.
La Vuelta is a regular redemption spot for Roglič, who is a three-time winner of the race. He won his second title here in 2020 after the enormous disappointment of his final time-trial loss of the Tour. In 2021 he won the race again after crashing out of the Tour de France. He came third last year behind then-teammates Kuss and Vingegaard, but will be a favourite in 2024. At the very least he has the fact that the race isn’t in France on his side.
He also has Aleksandr Vlasov for company in his team bus, another rider who has looked strong all year but then didn’t finish the Tour de France.
Spain has a contender to cheer for in Enric Mas, who is another who much prefers La Vuelta to Le Tour. Mas failed to finish the Tour in 2022 after testing positive for covid, and in 2023 barely got started after crashing on the first stage and promptly withdrawing. In 2022 he finished second at the Vuelta and last year sixth.
Mas didn’t have such bad luck at the Tour this year, finishing nineteenth, but largely anonymously. He has three second places at the Vuelta and even in the absence of Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar would probably be happy with that again.
There are others looking for late-season wins such as Wout van Aert, Adam Yates, João Almeida. All of these riders don’t necessarily need wins but would like them all the same.
But I’ve neglected something important: La Vuelta has already started. Stages one and two have gone by and so two men and teams are already happy with their race. The first is Brandon McNulty of UAE Team Emirates, a surprise winner of the opening time trial. He may be American national champion but to beat Wout van Aert, Josh Tarling and the like was, in his own words, “something crazy.”
The second is Kaden Groves, the sprinter who won stage two. He’s now won five stages at La Vuelta, so his win was a fair bit less crazy.
He avoided a crash at the end of stage two which took out Josh Tarling of Ineos Grenadiers. Considering he is another man who came into this race looking for redemption after a puncture cost him a medal at the Olympics, he is likely the unhappiest man in Spain tonight.
Some riders find redemption at La Vuelta, others just find more pain.
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