Taking One for the Team
A heartwarming human interest story in the red jersey, a time trial interrupted by protest, and some interesting tactics from the big teams at the Vuelta
Last week, I laid out my predictions—hopes, really—for the first week of the Vuelta a España: Tom Pidcock stomping into red on a punchy Stage 2 finish, a monster Ineos Grenadiers team time trial to take Egan Bernal into the race lead in Stage 5…
Both of those things almost happened. Almost. Pidcock was in the mix on the final climb of the first hilly stage, but he faded to 10th at the finish as Jonas Vingegaard and Giulio Ciccone ran away with the reduced bunch sprint. That was only the first of a trio of hilly stages that I thought suited Pidcock, but after Stage 4 he’d made no progress, losing 16 seconds to leaders Vingegaard and David Gaudu1 and making it to fifth on GC. Close, but not quite.
And when the riders lined up outside the Salvador Dalí museum for the team time trial, Filippo Ganna and Ineos got off the line well. They were in first place at the first time check, with a mark that stood to the end of the day, by one hundredth of a second and one thousandth of a kilometer per hour over UAE Team Emirates. But the Ineos effort collapsed after time check no. 2, as their squad was prematurely reduced to its minimum finishing number of four riders. Magnus Sheffield was among the casualties, and the fastest team in the first sector could only manage 16th out of 23 teams in the final sector.
The teams with the two big GC favorites—UAE and Visma-Lease a Bike—finished 1-2 in the team time trial, and at any rate the time gaps were trivial across the board. Six teams finished within 17 seconds of UAE’s winning time; another 10 surrendered less than 45 seconds to the leaders; all but three made it home less than a minute adrift.
Even Israel-Premier Tech.
Watching live, the NBC broadcast crew thought this was Decathlon-AG2R, which is quite an understandable mistake to make given that both teams ride in medium blue jerseys with light sleeves, and the camera shots from the helicopter were hardly spy satellite-quality.
Hey, it’s almost like kit redundancy is a foreseeable and preventable problem that someone’s written about in the past.
But unless I missed something,2 they never corrected themselves. I guess it’s not out of the question that someone would blockade a random pro cycling team. Cycling races, with their vast, unpoliceable playing fields and global TV audiences, are prime targets for protestors of all kinds. Every week, some French farmer parks his tractor across the road to express his disapproval of EU agricultural policy, or climate activists glue themselves to the the world championships.
“With or without Israel-PremierTech at the start, there would still have been demonstrations. You also see climate demonstrations during the Tour de France. These are big events where there is a lot of media attention,” two-time monument winner Jakob Fuglsang said last week.
But, yeah, having a team named Israel in the race…well, you could guess what these protesters wanted to say, even if you couldn’t read their banner or see their Palestinian flags.
I don’t know what’s changed in the past few months in a situation that’s been pretty self-evidently a genocide for almost two years and apartheid for as far back as I can remember, but the tide of public opinion seems to be turning. Apparently, now it’s distasteful to gun down journalists, aid workers, women and children en masse. To bomb hospitals and schools. To deny starving people food.
I have never for a second understood what makes the Gaza War now different from the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, why NATO invaded to stop the latter but the U.S. continues to fund and arm the perpetrators of the former, and the U.K. criminalizes dissent against it. This is a man-made atrocity, a crime against humanity for which the only correct remedy is to put generals and presidents on trial at the Hague.
But more people are speaking out now. Including Fuglsang, whose comments on protests (even before what happened on Wednesday) made international news. Fuglsang, who retired this month, rode the last three and a half seasons of his career for IPT, which obliged him to wear the team’s kit not only during races but on training rides as well. And he’s glad to put that chapter of his life behind him.
“It's of course nicer to be without,” Fuglsang said. “I don't want to get involved in what's happening politically, but it's definitely nicer to ride around without an Israel logo than with it.”
Israel Premier-Tech isn’t owned by the Israeli government, but rather by Canadian-Israeli businessman Sylvan Adams. But you don’t name a sports team after a country unless you want it to become a national symbol; in this respect, Israel-Premier Tech is hardly unique in the pro peloton.
And that symbolic status makes IPT a legitimate target for protest. The people who blocked the road on Wednesday could not have picked a better spot. A team time trial is the only road racing format in which riders are separated by team, and teams are separated from each other. Rather than stop the whole peloton—which, given the stakes, would’ve been worth the extra effort—these protestors were as targeted and specific as they could be. This is the first grand tour team time trial since the current war began, and only the second World Tour-level second team time trial in which IPT has competed.
It was the perfect opportunity, and I hope the protests only get noisier from here.
I don’t know how to transition back to straightforward cycling coverage from here.
When Vingegaard took the red jersey on Stage 2, I wondered if he’d just hang on to it all the way to Madrid. He’s the best climber in the race, and one of the best time trialists among the GC guys. Clearly Visma-Lease a Bike can handle itself in the team time trial, and Vingegaard is in good enough form to hold his own on punchier terrain. Tadej Pogačar took the maglia rosa on Stage 2 of the Giro last year and never gave it up, so it’s doable.
But the most interesting thing about this race has been the variety of ways in which Vingegaard has contrived to gain and lose the overall lead. Gaudu won stage three, with Vingegaard third, reversing their placings from the day before. That meant the two riders were level on time—both on the road and in bonus seconds—but Vingegaard retained the red jersey on countback, by virtue of his superior finish on Stage 1.
So Gaudu went all-in for bonus seconds on Stage 4, winning none, before joining the group sprint at the end of the stage. There, he finished enough places ahead of Vingegaard to wear the red jersey for a day—a trivial accomplishment for a rider of Vingegaard’s stature, but a monumental one for Gaudu, a career stage hunter and back-end-of-the-top 10 GC guy.
Visma-Lease a Bike bested Gaudu’s FDJ squad by 16 seconds in the team time trial, putting Vingegaard back out in red for the first mountain stage on Thursday.
Visma-Lease a Bike3 let the break go here, releasing UAE’s Jay Vine for the stage win and putting Torstein Træen in the lead on GC. If you don’t know that name, I don’t blame you; Træen, a 30-year-old Norwegian, has ridden most of his career for Uno-X before moving to Bahrain Victorious in 2024. He had never ridden a grand tour before 2023.
The most interesting thing about Træen is something I just learned when Cycling Weekly recirculated an article about him from 2023. In 2022, Træen got a call from his team doctor, telling him that he’d tested positive for human chorionic gonadotropin (hGC), which men only produce in very low levels. WADA tests for hGC because it can stimulate testosterone production, but in men, naturally occurring high levels can be a sign of testicular cancer.
Træen got checked, and sure enough, it was option no. 2. Six weeks after the initial positive test, Træen had his left testicle (which held a 15 milimeter tumor) removed. Two months later, he was racing again, and he’s been cancer-free ever since. No chemo or radiation required. Pretty wild story.
Træen and three other riders from the breakaway currently lead the GC, with Vingegaard two minutes and 33 seconds behind. João Almeida,4 Ciccone,5 the Red Bull duo of Jai Hindley and Guilio Pellizzari, Bernal, Felix Gall and Pidcock are all within 30 seconds of Vingegaard.
What interests me is the way UAE has played this so far.
First of all, I was wrong last week; Almeida is not riding for Juan Ayuso, it’s the other way around. I didn’t think Almeida had a grand tour GC win in him,6 but Ayuso is apparently not feeling it. Wearing the best young rider’s white jersey into Stage 6, he was dropped on the final climb and lost 10 minutes. He’s now on full domestique-and-stage hunting duty.
The same goes for Vine, who hit the brakes in the finale of Stage 1, losing three and a half minutes on a flat stage. Despite being one of UAE’s stronger time trialist, he burned out early in the TTT and lost another minute and a half on Stage 5.
Without those losses, he would never have been allowed to attack with the break on Thursday, and he never would’ve won that stage. It is interesting that even after Almeida had his mechanical and Ayuso dropped, UAE didn’t pull him back for satellite rider duty, so this all seems to be part of the plan.
UAE is going to need every shell in its bandoleer in order to take Vingegaard down, but it’s already invested in a stage hunting/mountains classification campaign for Vine. And in contrast to the Giro, where Ayuso had backup in the form of Brandon McNulty and Isaac del Toro, Marc Soler is the only other UAE rider who’s anywhere near the GC picture.
Soler is a prolific domestique and mountain stage hunter, especially at the Vuelta, and he won Paris-Nice in 2018. But since 2019, he only has eight top-10 GC finishes at stage races of any length and any level, and no podiums, let alone wins. It’s Almeida or bust.
Maybe that’s a good thing; one reasonable conclusion to draw from the Giro is that maybe UAE caused more problems than it solved by keeping its options open.
But now, the only way for Almeida to beat Vingegaard is in a head-to-head battle. And that matchup is only going in one direction.
Almost all of it in bonsues
Which is possible, since I stepped away from the TV for a few minutes shortly after this
And Ineos and Lidl-Trek and Red Bull, and anyone else with designs on GC
Who survived a mechanical and a bike change late in Stage 6
Who’s looked as strong as I can ever remember this first week
I’m still not sure, though he’s been pretty much faultless so far