That was less of a 50km attack by Aru than it was a 50 km drop by Dumoulin. Don't think I've ever seen a team carrying their leader to a gt win this badly.
Anyway, 2015 Vuelta had a pretty cool third week because they basically only had three medium mountain stages left to drop Dumoulin, but they only even got into that position because the 3 big mountain stages on the tailend of week two were an absolute borefest of everyone letting Landa set the pace before trying to follow Purito's acceleration on the final kilometre. Andorra was also good and the Cumbre del Sol was possibly the most exciting murito finish I've ever seen but overall the first 2 weeks of the 2015 Vuelta were pretty dreadful.
The 2015 Tour I think is pretty underrated. The first week was pretty meh due to a complete lack of mountains (it still had cobbles and a great crosswind stage though) but from the pyrenees onwards it was brilliant. LPSM was legendary, we got a pretty good battle in Mende, a Nibali downhill attack in Gap, long range attack attempts by Nibali/Contador/Quintana on all of the four Alps stages. People don't remember it that fondly because eventually Quintana blew his chance by trying to sneak away from Froome on the Croix de Fer instead of using the fact that he was at that point simply climbing a lot better than him. But I think the most telling thing about that Tour is when you look at the time gaps on the mountain stages. We had some all out racing that year, which I feel we haven't really seen in a single Tour mountain stage since (with the excption of one that got cancelled half way through)
About the 2017 Giro. It was alright, it got really close in the end and really could have been won by 3 different guys but it was missing a truly great stage. Blockhaus and Oropa were good but not great. Sh*tgate was a shocker but then there wasn't really that much action till the descent. Then we had our big final 3 mountain stages were we expected Nibali and Quintana to finally properly show their cards and just when we thought the battle would really start they both faded away and the top climbers for the last set of mountain stages were Pinot and Ilnur Zakarin. Despite being so close it felt somewhat anticlimacitic.
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