What if the Hammer Isn't Coming?
Jonas Vingegaard, it turns out, is not running away with the Vuelta
Before the start of the Vuelta a España, I was highly confident in my prediction that Jonas Vingegaard would finish first in the general classification. Here’s what I wrote at the time
[B]ased on what we saw at the Tour, this race is Vingegaard’s to lose. The gap between Vingegaard and everyone not named Tadej Pogačar was as big as the gap between Pogačar and Vingegaard, if not bigger.
Especially once UAE Team Emirates threw all its GC weight behind João Almeida, a rider who has excelled in one-week stage races but has never seriously contended for the overall victory at a grand tour. Before this Vuelta, Almeida had DNF’d his previous two grand tour starts, and on the two occasions on which he and Vingegaard both finished the same grand tour, the Portuguese rider finished roughly nine and 13 minutes behind his would-be rival.
I became convinced that UAE’s scattershot approach to this race—chasing a total of five wins from the break by three non-Almeida riders, plus the mountains classification for Jay Vine—was a tacit admission that even the team knew their guy didn’t have the juice this time around. And even if UAE merely holds serve from here on out, a second-place finish on GC, the KOM jersey, and seven stage wins—by four different riders, plus a team time trial victory—is a hell of an accomplishment, even for a squad as successful and well-resourced as this one.
But that assumption was predicated on a Vingegaard hammer drop that I have been waiting for since…well, I dunno, I guess Stages 6 and 7. On both of those occasions, Vingegaard and Almeida came to the finish together, behind a break that included at least one UAE rider.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, because this was during the brief Torstein Træen Red Jersey Experience. Maybe Vingegaard wasn’t too keen on placing his team back in the lead yet. And with plenty of other mountaintop finishes left to go, he could afford to be patient. After all, Vingegaard is one of the best in the world not only at climbing, but at growing into Week 3 of a GC battle. As one of only four grand tour winners on the startlist,1 Vingegaard has special insight into how to recover through the course of a three-week grand tour.
Vingegaard dropped Almeida again on the hilly finish to Stage 11 in Bilbao, though protests moved the stage finish up by some three kilometers, limiting Vingegaard and Tom Pidcock’s time gains to 10 seconds.
Two days later, the leaders ascended the Alto de l’Angliru, the ne plus ultra of punishing mountain climbs. A hellacious pace on the lower pitches reduced the leaders’ group to four2 with more than five kilometers to go, and at the time I thought…well, I’ll just show you.
Last time Vingegaard was here, he broke through the gloom and the mist and near-darkness3 to gap Kuss, his teammate, to win the stage and nearly the GC. Up until that moment, I would have picked the sprightly, preternaturally chill, and three-lunged American to beat any man on two wheels up a climb like this. If Vingegaard could beat Kuss on the Angliru, surely he could beat Almeida, who’s 10 pounds heavier and more on the time trial specialist side of the GC rider spectrum.
And with so much real estate left on the road, if Vingegaard went—especially if Kuss launched him—the gains could be massive.
And I kept waiting and waiting and waiting…and the hammer never dropped. Almeida dropped everyone but Vingegaard, but rather than come around and climb to victory, the two-time Tour de France winner just clung to his rival’s wheel until the crest of the climb.
This could not have been a more perfect launchpad to GC dominance, and Vingegaard either couldn’t or wouldn’t light the rocket. The same on Stage 17, where Red Bull’s Italian youngster Giulio Pellizzari attacked and scampered off to a solo win.
The options for the other riders to follow were limited, because Pidcock and Matthew Riccitello (the latter being Pellizzari’s main rival for the white jersey of the best young rider) kept trying to bridge across, and were repeatedly closed down by Hindley, who had one eye on his own battle for third with Pidcock, and one eye on protecting Pellizzari.4
BUT THERE’S NO GODDAMN HAMMER. WHERE IS THE HAMMER?
Continued pro-Palestine protests5 led the organizers to lop off the last eight kilometers of Stage 16, then shortened the race’s lone individual time trial from 27 kilometers to 12, so the entire course could be cordoned off. That last is probably a good idea, given the speeds involved in a flat time trial, achieved at times just a foot or two from the curb.
It is funny to imagine that they settled on the ultimate length of the stage because there are only 22 kilometers of portable fencing available. One imagines the King of Spain sending all his horses and men around the Iberian peninsula to scour every village for more barriers.
Anyway, in just 12.2 kilometers, Almeida put 10 seconds into Vingegaard.
This is not academic anymore; this is a real race. The gap between Vingegaard and Almeida, which peaked at 50 seconds, is down to 40. That can be overhauled in no time, especially with 10 bonus seconds available for a stage win. If Vingegaard has intentionally bided his time, he has made a catastrophic error in judgment, so much so that I don’t find that plausible anymore.
At this moment, it looks like Almeida is at least equally strong as Vingegaard, and perhaps stronger. By how much, I do not know. If I had to guess, not by enough to overhaul 40 seconds with only one climbing stage left. But that climbing stage is a doozy.
On Saturday, after traversing categorized climbs in the first 60 kilometers of the stage, the peloton will hit the Category-1 Puerto de Navacerrada: 6.9 kilometers at 7.5 percent. The final climb of the day is the outside-category Bola del Mundo, which is Spanish for Bola of the World.
This outside-category climb peaks at 2,253 meters, which is the highest elevation of this race and the only time the 2025 Vuelta gets above 2,000 meters’ elevation. In the final 28 kilometers, the riders will climb nearly 1,300 vertical meters, or about 200 meters less than the peak of the Angliru is above sea level. And the climb only gets harder the higher up you go.
The average gradient of the entire 12.4 kilometer climb is 8.6%. But in the final three kilometers, the gradient gets into double digits, averaging about 12% over the final two kilometers and peaking at 23%.
Ordinarily, the harder and higher the climb gets, the more I’d like Vingegaard’s chances. But based on his form over the past week, I am no longer taking that for granted. On this climb, 40 seconds is nothing.
along with Sepp Kuss, Jai Hindley and Egan Bernal
Vingegaard, Almeida, Kuss, Hindley
There is no piece of real estate in cycling whose vibe changes more based on whether the sun is out
Hindley’s rearguard action on Stage 17 is my favorite moment of the race so far. It was like Han Solo shooting over his shoulder at stormtroopers to buy time for Luke and Leia to escape
I’m glossing over this part of the story just for time purposes; I feel like I said most of what there is to be said last week.