Splügenpass
João Almeida goes solo at the Tour de Suisse, Quinn Simmons is back, and the author fulfills a lifelong ambition
If you hate preamble, skip to the Subscribe button a few paragraphs from now. A pre-emptive acknowledgement that some readers might find part of a blog boring probably constitutes poor editorial judgment, but it’s a free newsletter, and tonight I’m doing something for the first time that I’ve always wanted to do.
I’m writing from a hotel bar with a cocktail by my elbow.
I’ve been working in journalism, to a greater or lesser extent, for almost 20 years now—genuinely, my entire adult life. And writing from the hotel bar always felt like one of the coolest things you could do. Certainly it’s the hallmark of the most glamorous kinds of print journalism, as depicted in fiction.
It’s political journalists in shirtsleeves hammering out the latest dispatch from the campaign trail at the Council Bluffs Hyatt. Sam Waterston at the beginning of The Killing Fields.1 Intrepid, reckless men in linen suits phoning in their stories about the Japanese advance on Port Moresby. Men who should not be able to sweat this much, seeing as how they haven’t drank water2 since 1938. Somerset Maugham at the Long Bar at Raffles in Singapore, possibly the coolest combination of man and place in the history of English literature.
Me? Well, I did wear linen pants for the first time in my life this week. Three times, in fact—it was 116 degrees today in Phoenix. But this is a somewhat less glamorous place and time: The Major League Baseball Scouting Combine, which is for my purposes a press junket for amateur baseball players. Access is hard to come by in this business, so sometimes the best way to get an exclusive sit-down with the Cy Young winner is to get it five years in advance.
And scoff if you like, but I’ve gotten really good at picking Cy Young winners of the distant future3 to write feature articles about. So check back in seven to nine years to see if anything’s come of Liam Doyle, Jamie Arnold or Noah Yoder.
The hotel bar, for what it’s worth, isn’t exactly Raffles either. At 8:22 p.m. local time, I’m the only person here. And I guess if you’re going to drink alone at a suburban Arizona Moxy,4 you’re going to do it in your room.
But not me, I want to write at the bar.
The big cycling event of this week is the Tour de Suisse, the other big Tour de France warmup race—an event that I was a little down at the time because most of the big Tour de France contenders seemed to be ignoring it.
Actually, a quick word on the Critérium du Dauphiné first, because the other thing that was happening last week was everyone freaking out about Tadej Pogačar getting blitzed in the individual time trial.
I think there’s an appetite, and I’ll concede I feel this appetite myself to an extent, to see Pogačar fail. Not because of any negative animus about the rider himself, but because he wins every big race and sometimes it’s nice to see something different.
The last time we saw Pog well and truly struggle was the 2023 Tour de France, which was, coincidentally, his big foray back into grand tour racing after selling out for the Tour of Flanders that spring. That Tour of Flanders win was such a big deal because it made Pogačar the first male rider in 30 years to put a grand tour GC win and a cobbled monument win on his palmarès over the course of a single career.
As the sport has become more specialized, anyone who’s hirsute and brawny enough to muscle over the rocks of Ronde van Vlaanderen or Paris-Roubaix would necessarily be too girthy to get over the Alpine massifs that define the Tour de France. Likewise, any waif who could conquer the big mountains would get shaken to bits on the cobbles. Pogačar alone could hit the middle, and even that adjustment knocked him down the totem pole from best GC rider in the world to second.
That and Jonas Vingegaard got the one perfect time trial and one super-hot mountain stage he needed to dispose of Pog. Ocean’s Law: Play long enough and never chance the stakes? The house takes you. Unless, when the perfect hand comes along, you bet big. Then you take the house.5
Full-climber Pog returned in 2024 and put in the most dominant grand tour season…I dunno, maybe ever. But this year, he not only recaptured his title at RVV, he went for the big tamale: Paris-Roubaix. And while he didn’t take home the big rock, he finished second.
So when he got beat not just by Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel, but by Matteo Jorgenson, and showed some gingerly bikehandling along the way, people started licking their chops.
I said last week that such observers were looking too hard for something that wasn’t actually there. It wasn’t a capitulation; it was fourth place, less than 40 seconds back of the best time trialist on the planet.6
The mountains came soon enough. On Stage 6, Pogačar finished first, 1:01 ahead of Vingegaard and a further 49 seconds ahead of Remco. The next day, he won again. Another 14 seconds into Vingegaard, more than two and a half additional minutes into Remco. The final margin of victory: 59 seconds over Vingegaard, with only one other rider (Florian Lipowitz, not Remco) within four minutes. Only eight riders finished within 10 minutes of Pogačar.
Same as it ever was.
But if there’s one thing I learned from the Giro, it’s that the absence of the sport’s biggest starts sometimes leads to some blockbuster racing action.
UAE has…I was going to be hyperbolic and say “a million” riders capable of winning a one-week World Tour stage race like this. But I don’t have to; I bet it’s actually double digits.
OK, I counted. UAE has 30 riders under contract; 10 of them have won GC in a grand tour or other World Tour stage race. Two others have yet to win a World Tour stage race but have podiumed a grand tour. Then there’s 20-year-old Jan Christen, who looks like an absolute monster already. He’ll get there soon enough. So that’s 13, and that doesn’t include Brandon McNulty, who fell through all those qualifiers but podiumed Paris-Nice last year and just finished ninth in the Giro while working for Juan Ayuso and/or Isaac del Toro.
The point is: UAE has bench depth. João Almeida is the big hitter in this lineup, and he hit big at the first opportunity.
The first category 1 stage of the race came in Stage 4 at the—and I regret that there’s no other way to say this but: the Splügen Pass.
In German: Splügenpass. In Italian: Passo dello Spluga. Near the Italian border, closer to the village of Montespulga in Lombardy. You know the place.
UAE drilled the tempo at the bottom of the climb; up went the favorites, back went the peloton, and on went Almeida.
It goes down on the ProCyclingStats scoreboard as a solo effort of nearly 50 kilometers, but almost 80 percent of that 50 kilometers was a descent off whatever geological feature was Splügening on Wednesday afternoon. Almeida only went solo 1,800 meters from the summit, put about 45 seconds into his rivals (Oscar Onley seems to be the one with the most juice at the moment) by the summit, and let Sir Isaac Newton do the rest. He won the stage by approximately that margin.
Right now, Almeida—who’s finished second, first and second over the past three stages—sits in third place, 42 seconds ahead of Onley. Kévin Vauquelin and Julian Alaphilippe sit in first and second, and while I’m thrilled to see Alaphilippe in good form after a couple rough seasons, this is Almeida’s race to lose.
There’s really only one climb left in the race worth talking about, in the Stage 8 mountain time trial. I know Switzerland is super mountainous—it’s, like, no. 5 on the list of things the country is famous for, after military neutrality, chocolate, pocketknives and not asking where the money came from when you deposit it in one of their banks—and there isn’t a flat stage as such in eight days of racing.
Still, no outside-category climbs and only five category 1 climbs isn’t a lot for a Tour de France warmup race, especially when all of those climbs are over and done with after stage 5.
By contrast, the Dauphiné had that crazygonuts stage with three HC climbs in 130 kilometers of racing and—
Oh, I get it. Do you think that’s why all the heavy hitters went to the Dauphiné and skipped the Tour de Suisse? I bet that’s why.
Almeida’s the best rider in the field, he’s the best time trialist7 and he’s got a head start. The race is his to lose.
But the headline rider of this race so far is Quinn Simmons, the recently crowned two-time U.S. national road race champion and former world junior champion.
U.S. men aren’t traditionally great classics riders. The best classics riders we’ve got are usually guys like Jorgenson and Neilson Powless; sort of hybrid climber-cobbler-breakaway-type guys who’d be out-and-out GC contenders if they were a little smaller. I bet if Jorgenson put his full focus toward the classics, he could make a run at a Tour of Flanders before his time is up, but it’s much more glamorous and lucrative for him to do be both Vingegaard’s understudy and Wout van Aert’s, while chasing the occasional one-week GC.
Simmons is a classics rider, full stop. He loves a Faulkner Special,8 pulling off a real doozy of the genre to win a stage of the Vuelta a San Juan in 2023. But bigger results haven’t really come. He got bamboozled by the EF duo of Lawson Craddock and Magnus Cort for a reduced bunch sprint win at the Vuelta a España a couple years back, and some strong riding at Strade Bianche has been undone by various flat tires and mechanical booboos.
There are two things about Simmons: One highly sympathetic, one highly not. I’ll take them in reverse order. Apart from winning that junior world championship, the thing Simmons is probably most known for is getting suspended by his team for being a dick on the internet. In 2020, an American cycling journalist posted an anti-Donald Trump message on Twitter, and Simmons’ reply was really gross on multiple levels.
Ordinarily I’m not especially inclined to hold a grudge about, well almost anything a 19-year-old says online, to be honest. But it doesn’t seem like Simmons learned much of anything from his suspension, and suffice it to say the intervening five years have made me far less charitable to people who say ignorant stuff to get a reaction and then pretend they don’t know what they’re doing.
With all that said, Simmons was in the break at the Tour de Suisse two years ago when Swiss rider Gino Mäder crashed, went over a cliff, and fell 30 meters to his death. Simmons saw the whole thing, and it messed him up. To the point where he almost gave up racing.
Simmons didn’t win a European race for almost two years after that. Earlier this year, he took a stage of the Volta a Catalunya, then the U.S. national championship in West Virginia three weeks ago.9
But he’s been all over the place in the Tour de Suisse. He was in the break three times in the first four stages, and on the only exception, Stage 2, he tried a Faulkner Special in the last kilometer and came very close to making it stick.
It became clear why after he won from the break on Stage 3. He dedicated that win to Mäder, two years and a day after the fatal accident, and got choked up when he said after the race that he’d wanted to win on June 16, the anniversary itself.
I so badly want to root, without reservation, for an American classics-and-breakaway guy with long hair and a horseshoe mustache. But these are not the days for uncomplicated jingoism, it seems. Not even mostly-joking low-stakes sports jingoism. I feel good about Simmons winning, and seemingly getting his career back on track. But that’s not the only thing I feel.
“Not to cramp your style, man, but I don’t think that’s supposed to be the main takeaway of The Killing Fields.”
Except mixed with scotch
Paul Skenes hasn’t won one yet but I think we can all agree he’s gone a Cy Young season in his bag at some point
A new-ish Marriott chain where the decor is half pink, half focus-grouped Millennial chic. There’s a Lovesac in my room where the couch should be. Last year there was a life-size picture on the wall of a woman in a bathing suit holding a two-cubic-foot ice cube. The year before my room came with an acoustic guitar. It’s very stupid. I love it. I stay here every time I’m in town.
Did that from memory. I’m pretty sure it’s right.
You can caveat that with “among GC contenders” but Remco is both the defending world and Olympic gold medalist, so with apologies to Big Phil Ganna, I’ll defer to the clock here
Which matters less on a parcours like Stage 8, but still
The low-risk, high-reward flat-ground “I must go now, my planet needs me” move in the last five kilometers of a flat stage. Basically just riding every sprint train in the peloton off your wheel and betting nobody’s going to get their shit together in time to chase
Although against a highly, highly diluted field. No McNulty, no Jorgenson, no Powless, no Kevin Vermaeke, no Matthew Riccitello, no Sean Quinn. Only four World Tour riders took the start, and Simmons was the only one of those over the age of 21
great post, absolutely cooking at the hotel bar