Introduction
Pro cycling has become pretty boring over the last couple of years due to the dominance of a few key riders, especially Tadej Pogacar. But this Vuelta got really exciting when Pogacar crashed out. The second most dominant stage racer of our era, Jonas Vingegaard, didn’t start, still getting over injuries sustained in the Tour de France. So this race has been oddly exciting, and we head into today’s queen stage with only 1:37 separating race leader Enric Mas (Movistar Team) from Primoz Roglic (Red Bull - Bora - Hansgrohe). And today is by far the hardest of the entire Vuelta, with three Category 1 climbs and then, at the finish, the only “Especial” (e.g., Hors Catégorie) climb on offer this year. So buckle up, caffeinate, and let’s go!
Vuelta a España Stage 20 – La Calahorra to Collado Del Alguacil
As I join the action, the riders have just over 60 kilometers left and are nearing the summit of the Category 1 climb to Puerto De El Purche. Why is it not “Del Purche”? Two reasons. First, “El Purche” is a formal name so it doesn’t get contracted. Second, “Del Purche” would make Americans think of “Del Taco,” which is distracting.
A breakaway has eight minutes on the red jersey group, and my cat is yowling pitifully for her breakfast. Wout van Aert (Team Visma - Lease a Bike) goes for the KOM points and—yikes, it’s super close!—barely takes them ahead of Pau Miquel (Bahrain Victorious).
Back in the main bunch, Richard Carapaz (EF Education - Easypost) attacks! He’s sitting fourth on GC, and would obviously love to take enough time out of Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM Team) to overtake him in the GC and finish on the podium. But Carapaz is pulled back in the time I took to type that.
So this is interesting: the overall leader in the KOM, Santiago Buitrago, didn’t make the breakaway. So he can’t contest any of the KOM points, and if Van Aert were to take all of them (I know, big “if”) he could end up winning that competition. Imagine losing your polka-dot jersey on the last day, and to a big guy like Wout (or “Woof” in my wife’s approximation, the one time she talked about pro cycling). So when Miquel contested that last KOM, it wasn’t for himself, it was to deprive Van Aert of maximum points, to defend Buitrago’s overall lead.
Now (like ten minutes later, as I had to make pour-over coffee and pet my weird old cat so she’d eat), Van Aert takes the intermediate sprint to seal his victory in the points competition for this Vuelta.
The breakaway is now nearing the penultimate climb, the Puerto de El Duque. One interesting development that they’re recapping now is that earlier in the race Sepp Kuss (Team Visma - Lease a Bike) attacked the red jersey group and now has about two minutes. If he goes really well on the final two climbs—perhaps with Van Aert dropping back to help him—he could move well into the top ten overall (he started today in 11th), possibly all the way up to fifth. This would be a nice feat after his heartbreaking loss in Stage 20 of this year’s Tour de France, when he seemed to be cruising to victory but crashed twice on the final descent.
Amost nine minutes later, the GC group hits the climb. Red Bull - Bora – Hansgrohe masses on the front for Roglic.
It’s odd, there’s apparently some chase group between the leaders and the red jersey group, but we’re not getting any footage. And I haven’t seen Kuss a single time, he’s just apparently floating out there somewhere, now 2:30 ahead of the red jersey group. And that group is seriously depleted so who knows how much time Kuss has on the rest of the top ten. Perhaps a bunch of cameramen and motorcycle drivers got laid off. Maybe their management thought AI could do this, perhaps with simulated footage. I’m picturing some unpaid intern feeding prompts into a GenAI chatbot: “Create video footage of Sepp Kuss pedaling up the Puerto de El Duque by himself, visibly suffering but eyes forward, focused. And don’t give him giant pecs.”
The breakaway has fractured, with three leaders now: Mikel Landa (Soudal Quick-Step), who heroically bridged up to this breakaway; Tobias Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility); and Ramses DeBruyne (Alpecin-Premier Tech). If the situation doesn’t change, they’ll take all (or at least most) of the KOM points and Van Aert’s KOM aspirations are scuttled. Which is fine. A guy that big shouldn’t take the KOM; that would turn the competition into a bit of a joke—more a variation on the points competition than a reward for actual climbers.
Carapaz attacks again!
Kind of an odd attack: instead of being set up by his teammate, Carapaz seems unaware of him. In fact, what is his teammate even doing there? It looks like he’s signing some sort of receipt being held by that motorcyclist. There is so much more to this sport than meets the eye.
Gall easily handles the attack. It really doesn’t look like Carapaz has the legs to take two minutes out of him today.
Dang, this red jersey group is down to just five riders: the top four overall plus Carapaz’s teammate Juan Felipe Rodriguez, or “JF-Rod” as nobody calls him—yet. (You read it here first!)
Oh my, now Carapaz is starting to go off the back and Gall is right with him, probably figuring he has no reason to try to hang with the top three and just needs to “keep his enemy closer,” as the saying goes. But the rest of this group doesn’t seem to have much incentive to drop them.
Now the red jersey group is just totally chilling as the GC leaders eye each other. Bruno Armirail (Team Visma - Lease a Bike) is able to catch up to them.
Carapaz attacks again (he does this so much, I’m not bothering with an exclamation point, much less a photo) and the three others react. Armirail is dropped again, at least for now. They scoop up some rando from the breakaway and then Carapaz attacks again. The commentators just called this “cat and mouse,” which is a predictable utterance but honestly not that apropos. Sure, a cat will play with a mouse, especially once it’s wounded, but Carapaz isn’t playing, not really. He’d much rather kill these guys than keep them alive to play with them. It’s a matter of intent. Also, unlike a cat and a mouse, they are of the same species. It’s only Pogacar who isn’t, and he’s not here.
One of Mas’s henchmen, Ivan Romeo, has dropped back from the breakaway to help his leader. Note that when we’re looking for a synonym for “teammate” we can say “henchmen” but not “minion.” I think the “Despicable Me” movies have pretty much ruined “minion” for a good while as we now picture silly little yellow goggly-eyed dudes. Kind of how Disney’s “Fantasia” ruined a beautiful piece of classical music, Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” by associating it with an animated dancing hippo.
So as it stands, this leading trio has almost ten minutes on the red jersey sextet. (“Huh huh … he said ‘sex.’”) About half a minute back is Miquel; then there’s a chase group another minute behind and who cares who’s in it; and then about three minutes behind that we (reportedly) have Van Aert and Kuss working together. (Still no footage of them.) So if Kuss keeps riding this well, he’ll leap to fifth overall on GC, and if he goes really well I suppose it’s possible he could catch these leaders. Their gap is 4:28 but it’s a really long climb, 11 kilometers left.
Dang, Gall misses his feed!
It’s pretty scary missing your feed, especially when you know you need the calories. In my last collegiate national championship road race, the person assigned to our Berkeley team’s feeds somehow flaked entirely. Fortunately, my brother was on the sideline with a cooler of bottles, supporting his Cal Poly team. I yelled, “Give me a bottle!” and—he didn’t! He was more loyal to his damn college than his own brother! Later he actually defended this position! Fortunately the laps weren’t that long, and the next time through I literally ripped a bottle right out of my brother’s hand. I’m still fuming over that episode, 36 years later. (This interlude brought to you by Gatorade … is it in you?)
Another breakaway rider has dropped back, Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull - Bora - Hansgrohe), to help Roglic.
It’s getting interesting: James Shaw (EF Education - Easypost ) has also dropped back from the breakaway, to drive tempo in the red jersey group—not to set Carapaz up for an attack, but just to keep Kuss from taking too much time and displacing Carapaz in the overall.
And finally we get some footage—or perhaps it’s a deepfake?—of the Kuss group. They’ve caught a bunch of breakaway orphans, including Jorgen Nordhagen, another of Kuss’s thugs.
In the breakaway, Landa attacks! He looks great!
He instantly opens a giant gap. Dang, Johannessen is way off the back. And DeBruyne … he’s nowhere, he’s gone, he’s a cipher, a shadow, a ghost, a nonentity, a wraith, a lack. Nobody will remember that he was even here today.
Landa is flying but Johannessen hasn’t given up. They both seem puzzled: Landa looks back, as if wondering “where did he go?” and Johannessen is scratching his head (well, the back of his neck since he’s wearing a helmet) as if wondering, “What just happened?”
So, Kuss started today just over six minutes behind Carapaz; now he’s about 5:30 ahead on the road with around five kilometers to go. It’s just possible he could get enough time to move into fourth overall … it will have something to do with how much the GC battle for first heats up. If Gall or Roglic makes a huge attack and Carapaz can hang, that would surely help the Ecuadorian … unless he’s too fried from his ceaseless attacks. I’ll bet he’s regretting those now.
Mas has two teammates in this group now, setting tempo on the front. Maybe they’re starting to worry about Kuss, too. I’ll bet Carapaz is silently cheering them on, and Roglic is thinking, “You bastards.”
Now Red Bull - Bora - Honsgrohe is setting tempo for Roglic and he’s still thinking, “You bastards.”
Wow, Fisher-Black completely detonates and goes out the back as if shot from a cannon.
With just over three kilometers to go, Landa is looking completely solid. Unless he randomly cracks, he’s got the stage win. He’s climbing in the drops like a boss.
It appears Van Aert has finally blown. So Kuss just has Nordhagen pacing him. Kuss looked like he was struggling just a bit, a few minutes ago, when Van Aert was drilling it on the front of the group. The gap to the red jersey group is dropping a bit now. It appears Kuss will have to settle for fifth overall, but hey—jumping six places in one stage is still pretty impressive.
The GC group overtakes Van Aert. He just watches them go by, being a true gentleman. Had he grown up on the mean streets, he’d probably be crashing Carapaz right now.
Kuss hands his bottle to Nordhagen—“Here, you take this, it’s too heavy.”
PeacockTV (or “the cock” in common parlance) blocks screen grabs so I have to snap photos of the screen with my phone, which is why they’re so blurry and awful. So as an experiment, in post-production, I had ChatGPT sharpen up the above photo for me:
Gosh, it did a great job, except it just guessed about who is handing up the bottle and gave him a generic face. That’s not going to do; at least with the blurry photo you were free to imagine it’s Sepp Kuss, and there wasn’t obvious tampering with the photo, which of course causes an unpleasant feeling of deception. So much for that.
Romeo is doing a kickass job for Mas.
Landa is clearly suffering. He’s pretty old, like 36, and has raced professionally for 15 years. How many gymnasts can still achieve glory at that age? Most NFL players are in wheelchairs by then.
Gall attacks the GC group!
Roglic absolutely can’t respond, nor can Carapaz. I doubt Gall can take enough time to overtake Roglic on GC; he needs 1:24. But with Carapaz and Roglic isolated and not going that well, they could start to lose more time to Kuss.
Look at this, Mas is having a hard time closing the gap!
Landa is closing in on the finish line. I think he’s got this, mainly because he’s on a Specialized bike. They practically pedal themselves. (Note: I was not compensated in any way for saying this. Also, that Gatorade thing above? Pure malarkey.)
I’ve never seen a team car so closely following a rider. I reckon his team director is in his ear saying, “Go faster or we’ll run your ass over!”
Landa has the win. As he crosses the line it really looks like he’s suffering too much even to savor the victory. It fact this looks more like a gallstone being passed. Does it hurt as much to pass Gall? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Landa pioneers a new victory salute: the “I can’t bear to watch.” This would be a dangerous salute at the end of a sprint stage.
Johannessen is weaving as he makes his way over the line for second place.
Gall is solo … Mas can’t hang with him (but doesn’t need to, either).
Behind, among random breakaway stragglers, Kuss is going all-out, trying to grow that gap over Carapaz.
We don’t have any splits between Kuss and Carapaz, there just aren’t enough camera bikes. Which begs a question: how much does even Carapaz know? He’s just in no-man’s land, no idea how far ahead Kuss is, just grinding out whatever pace he can, hoping for the best.
Now Nordhagen paces Kuss to the line and he’s either cheering him on or bawling him out, I can’t tell which—just a lot of gesticulations.
And now Gall crosses the line. He didn’t attack early enough to change his GC prospects, which is almost as regrettable as his dorky sunglasess.
Not everyone appreciates my harsh sartorial judgments. A cycling friend told me once, “Nothing looks dorky when you win.” Okay, first of all, that’s completely untrue (anyone can look like a dork), and second, Gall didn’t win. But he did cement his podium spot for the overall.
Mas crosses the line about twenty seconds behind Gall. It appears that the chin strap on his helmet has spontaneously failed and he must hold his helmet on. Either that or this is a gesture of some kind, perhaps related to the facepalm? Indicating general disbelief at how hard this stage was?
Just over half a minute passes and now Roglic crosses the line. He limited his losses to Gall today and held on to his second place overall, which isn’t bad since a) he had a bad crash in training not so long ago, and b) he’s even older than Landa. He looks relieved: not just at successfully defending second overall, but that his children are still far too young to be thinking of putting him in a home.
Carapaz comes in all by his lonesome, hanging on to fourth overall but looking pretty blown.
They’re interviewing Landa.
INTERVIEWER: It’s been eleven years since you won a stage of the Vuelta, and we’d frankly given up on you.
LANDA: I feel happy, this was something I was looking for for a long time, finally I win again. It’s fortunate, it’s been really hot, today was my last chance.
INTERVIEWER: You just went two entire sentences without thanking your team. I’m pretty sure you’ll get cancelled for this.
LANDA: Oh no. This just went from being my best day ever to probably the worst. Could we start the interview over?
INTERVIEWER: Sorry, there’s no time for that.
LANDA: Could I claim dementia?
INTERVIEWER: It’s worth a shot, but the way you played the tactics today, that’s not going to be very credible. I recommend you dismiss this entire interview as a deepfake.
LANDA: Ooh, that’s good!
Here is the stage result.
And here is the new GC.
I guess they haven’t figured out tenth place yet ... riders are still trickling in. The way the peloton exploded today, it could be a while.
Now they’re interviewing Enric Mas.
INTERVIEWER: You seem to now have this Vuelta in the bag. Where are you gonna go after tomorrow’s stage?
MAS: I was just counting the kilometers and my feeling was super, so super good, I won because the team did everything for me.
INTERVIEWIER: I was baiting you, hoping you’d reflexively say “I’m going to Disneyland!” But you’re clearly a consummate professional, mentioning your team more or less instantly. You can live another day, scorn free, in the public eye. Well done.
Full confession: I was so displeased with the blurry photo of Mas, I had ChapGPT clean it up, and while I was at it I made some other adjustments. You’re going to have to get used to this kind of thing ... GenAI isn’t going away.
Well, unless something truly unusual happens in tomorrow’s final stage—and I for one will not be up early enough to see it—that’s all for this year’s Vuelta a España. Check back in a month because, unless I forget, I’ll cover the Paris-Tours classic. Thanks for reading, and I’d like to take this moment to thank all my teammates for making this coverage possible.
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