David Stanley
2024 Vuelta a España Week Three Final Review
David Stanley is an experienced cycling writer. His work has appeared in Velo, Velo-news.com, Road, Peloton, and the late, lamented Bicycle Guide (my favorite all-time cycling magazine). Here's his Facebook page. He is also a highly regarded voice artist with many audiobooks to his credit, including McGann Publishing's The Story of the Tour de France and Cycling Heroes.
David L. Stanley
David L. Stanley's masterful telling of his bout with skin cancer Melanoma: It Started with a Freckle is available in print, Kindle eBook and audiobook versions, just click on the Amazon link on the right.
David L. Stanley writes:
The Vuelta is chaos. By design. While the Giro takes pride in its history and Italian heritage, while the Tour de France continues to be defined by its mélange of La France Profonde and hi-tech that drives its status as the world’s greatest annual sporting event, it is in Spain where chaos reigns. The organizers have no regard for the thousands who work the event. They care not about the shortened rest available to the peloton. How so? There are often hundreds of kilometers traversed between one stage finish and the next stage’s depart. But wait, there’s more. The organizers work overtime to find the most severe climbs in all the sport. Put this all in one cesta. Lastly, picture Snidely Whiplash twirling his mustache and rubbing his hands together moments after he has tied Nell to the railroad tracks again as riders and all their follow vehicles are sent up barely paved Pyrenean chamois paths again and again.
The Vuelta route designer when he's not sending riders up nearly vertical dirt roads..
But you gotta admit, it makes for one helluva three-week race.
Here in the US, American football dominates the sports year. There are, in reality, three football seasons. Season 1) The 17 actual games, plus the playoffs and Super Bowl, which are played from late August to the first week of February. Season 2) Training camp and the talk about training camp which runs from about the 4th of July until the start of the games. Season 3) The draft season.
The NFL has a distributive draft where eligible college players are chosen by the teams. The draft consists of seven rounds over two days, the weakest teams are given first picks, and it’s a big party. This year’s draft was held in Detroit, just 70 miles away from me, and over the two evenings, over 775,000 people showed up to watch which players would end up trying out for which teams.
A multi-million dollar cottage industry has sprung up amongst bloggers, vloggers, and TV/Radio talking heads. The Draft Guru. These guys, with a heady mix of magick, omen reading, augury, necromancy, and 40 yard dash times, try to identify which teams will chose which players. After the first round of picks, they are usually wrong. But I can’t ever remember any of these ‘gurus’ talking about any of their failures. I aim to rectify that with my picks for this Vuelta. Here was my Top Ten.
My top ten:
- Joao Almeida
- Richard Carapaz
- Carlos Rodriguez/Mikel Landa
- Mikel Landa/Carlos Rodriguez
- Brandon McNulty
- Sepp Kuss
- Ben O’Connor
- Isaac Del Toro
- Adam Yates
- Wout van Aert
As you can see, my predictions were about as accurate as Aristotle’s prediction that the Earth was at the center of the Universe.
1. Almeida, a victim of Covid.
2. Carapaz, definitely in the hunt, and ultimately 4th place, 4:02 back of Roglic.
Richard Carapaz in the fog on the stage 15 Cuitu Negru climb. Sirotti photo
3/4. Landa/Rodriguez – top ten results, always good, but not the podium
5. McNulty – top 50, nearly 2 hours behind, until he crashed out of the time trial.
6. Kuss – 14th place, 20:25 behind, not a bad ride, but disappointing for the defending champ.
Sepp Kuss finishes stage 19. Sirotti photo
7. O’Connor – Second place and the man who made this race. 2:36 back. 11th place in the closing TT, 1:05 behind one of the world’s finest time trialists, Stephen Kung. Chapeau and Kudos.
8. Del Toro – another covid patient, but he continued with a low viral load to snag 36th place, albeit 1:57:27 behind. Two hours.
9. Yates – 12th place, 15:40 back, right in there with Kuss. A solid showing, and the only prediction I got correct.
10. Wout Van Aert – Another exciting ride from a guy who might well have worn the climber’s jersey AND the points jersey. But for that season ending crash on stage 16.
Wout van Aert in the Green points jersey after stage 12, before he crashed out of the race. Sirotti photo
Who’d I miss? Well, most of the men who mattered: Lipowitz, Mas, and Primoz.
Florian Lipowitz gave Primoz wings in the late moments of every stage. He would take 7th place in Madrid, only 7:05 behind his captain, one of the epic performances of the race. Enric Mas rode a superb race. He dared to challenge and/or answer Primoz. He would take 3rd place on GC, just 3:13 behind the winner.
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That leaves us with Primoz the Python. He and his team committed a definite
tactical error when they let Ben O’Connor open a near 5 minute lead on stage 6, but inexorably, Primoz and his boys: Lipowitz, Dani Martinez, Roger Adrià, and Aleksander Vlasov, were far and away the toughest team in the race. On every stage where time could be recovered, the four strong men of RBBH kept Primoz neat and square until everyone was near the breaking point. An attack, perhaps a second jump, and Roglic was again up the road.
Stage 19: Roglic away and off the front, on his way to the red jersey waiting for him at the end of the stage. Sirotti photo
Where did I go so horribly wrong? I even said that Martinez would end up as the
team leader before the end of the three weeks.
1. Roglic of late has shown some difficulty in the third weeks of grand tours. Clearly, not in this one.
2. Personal issues – I still bristle at the way he treated Sepp Kuss in last year’s Vuelta. (I know, rookie move, never let your emotions choose your bets. But I did.)
3. Age. Primož Roglič turns 35 on 29 October. It seemed unlikely that he could reach the same levels of fitness that garnered him a Giro win (2023) and three consecutive Vueltas (2019-21).
4. While the Python stays upright with the best of them in short stage races, he’s been known to crash in the Grand Tours. You crash once or twice at speed, it’s like getting beat up just like Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and his brother Dominick (Philip Suriano) did in the cornfield in Casino. It starts to wear on you. As far as I could see, Roglic crashed just once this race, Stage 8, and he still managed to win the stage and pull back time on BOC.
More on this later. Let’s talk Las Grandes (y agradables) sorpresas.
Eddie Dunbar (Jayco/AlUla) y Pablo Castrillo (Kern Pharma). Four stage wins
between them. Eddie took stages 11 & 20. Eddie’s stage 11 win was a master class in the closing kilometer sneak attack. His stage 20 victory was as courageous as a win-all race. On the ultra-steep rampas Picon Blanco,Eddie Dunbar attacked with 5km to go and got up to the leader Sivakov. The Irishman attacked solo with 2.5km to go and got free.
Eddie Dunbar wins stage 11. ASO photo
Roglic, David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ), Enric Mas (Movistar) and Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) tried to chase him down and yet, Dunbar powered to his second La Vuelta 2024 stage win, 7 sec ahead of Mas and 10 sec ahead of Roglic. Eddie is 28 years old, finished 1:56 behind the stage 21 time trial winner Stephen Kung, and claimed 11th on the final GC, 11:41 behind the Slovenian winner. Is it possible that for all the U-25 Masters of the Grand Tours, this Vuelta marks the breakthrough for the middle-aged champion?
Meanwhile, the 23-year-old Castrillo set all of Spain alive with his wins for the
home team Equipo Kern Pharma. Kern isn’t even a top-tier team. As a UCI Pro Team, it’s a lot like seeing a Second Division English Football League team winning a few games against 1st Division Premier League teams. In short, Castrillo’s two wins were earth-shaking.
Pablo Castrillo wins stage 12. Sprnt Cycling photo
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He took stages 12 and 15 from the breakaway. Castrillo won stage 12 after
a heinously tough battle on the slopes leading to the Manzaneda mountain resort. He got the better of his breakaway companions, as Max Poole (DSM-Firmenich-PostNL) came second by 8 seconds, and Marc Soler (UAE Team Emirates) by 16. He won stage 15 by distancing himself from breakaway companions Aleksandr Vlasov and Pavel Sivakov on the hellishly steep slopes of Cuitu Negru—one of the most brutal climbs of that year's Vuelta.
Primoz rode true until the very end in Madrid. While Stephen Kung averaged
55.8 kph over the final stage TT of 24.6 km in a time of 26:28, Roglic showed he could time trial with the very best as he trailed by only 31 seconds. Kung, a two time winner of Chrono des Nations, is one of the current best men against the clock.
Stefan Küng wins stage 21.
Primoz took 34 seconds from 2nd place Ben O’Conner on the last stage. O’Connor
proved he was a worthy opponent over the 3 weeks as he took 28 seconds out of Enric Mas, the third man on the podium.
Ben O'Connor starts stage 9. Sirotti photo
Throughout this race, I kept waiting (not hoping but waiting [and doesn’t that
sound like the title for a poem]) for the Slovenian leader to commit an act of Roglicide. He never did. The Slovenian squeezed tighter and tighter at every turn until all the bones of his adversaries had turned to jelly.
While the Vuelta is chaos by design, after 3,289 kilometers raced at an average
speed of 40.2 km/hr over the Ultima Thule of climbs in Spain, Primož Roglič put all in order with his 4th Vuelta win. Win number four ties him with the EPO-era record holder Roberto Heras as the only men with four. Alberto Contador and Toni Rominger each have three. PR also claimed three stages. With his 15 stage wins overall, Primoz is 6th on the all-time wins list. He is also number two on the all-time list of days spent in the leader’s jersey with 42, just behind the Swiss Alex Zulle with 48. That’s dominance.
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Primož Roglič put on a stunning display. After a serious tactical miscue that
allowed Ben O’Connor to put nearly 5:00 on the field, Roglic and his RBBH crew put together a textbook lesson in how to punish the field and take charge of a Grand Tour. I loved the first two GTs of the season as we watched 'the other Slovenian' Tadej Pogačar toy with the field, but this Vuelta was the race that, day to day, you absolutely did not want to miss a single stage.
The Red Jersey, the reward for winning an exciting Vuelta a España. Sirotti photo
The Zurich World’s hold much promise, September 21-29. #TogetherWeRide –
indeed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s 74F and sunny here at 43N, 83.7W, and I need to go for a ride. Hasta luego, mis amigos y amigas!
David Stanley, like nearly all of us, has spent his life working and playing outdoors. He got a case of Melanoma as a result. Here's his telling of his beating that disease. And when you go out, please put on sunscreen.