• The Cycling News forum is still looking to add volunteer moderators with. If you're interested in helping keep our discussions on track, send a direct message to @SHaines here on the forum, or use the Contact Us form to message the Community Team.

    In the meanwhile, please use the Report option if you see a post that doesn't fit within the forum rules.

    Thanks!

Race Design Thread

Page 296 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
Stage 5: Xàtiva - La Vall d'Uixò, 202km

6jN1sGI.png


wNSyvvp.png


GPM:
Alto de Montmayor (cat.2) 33,5km @ 2,3%
Puerto de Almedijar (cat.2) 6,6km @ 6,2%
Puerto de Eslida (cat.3) 5,0km @ 6,0%

Still in Comunidad Valenciana, the péloton now has a transitional stage heading northwards into the Provincia de Castellón. The stage start is a short transfer - just a few kilometres - north from Cocentaina to Xàtiva. Originating in a Roman-era settlement by the name of Saetabis, the city has a long history including the birth of two popes and importance in the field of paper manufacture after the technology was introduced to them via the Moors. During the Wars of the Spanish Succession the city was ransacked and destroyed by Felipe V's men, with the monarch instructing the city to be renamed San Felipe. Its most famous landmark is the Castillo de Xàtiva, which lies on the ancient Via Augusta which runs from the Pyrenees down the coast to other ancient ports, Cartagena and Cadíz. It has featured a couple of times in the Vuelta in recent memory, firstly in 2004 when it was the départ for a week 1 mountain stage to the Alto de Aitana, won by Leonardo Piepoli, and then in 2009 when it hosted the start AND finish of a week 1 stage, a fairly tepid affair in that conservatively raced edition to counteract the logistical problem of the rest day coming after stage 4, as basically the entirety of the rest of week 1 took place in Comunidad Valenciana and saw the maillot oro being traded between sprinters until Cancellara took it back in the ITT. Borut Božič won the stage for surprise wildcard entry Vacansoleil, however Daniele Bennati couldn't manage to acquire the bonus seconds he needed to take the leader's jersey off of André Greipel.

6_perfil.gif

La-ruta-de-la-creama-de-X%C3%A0tiva-1230x450.jpg


Early on we pass through another city which has hosted plenty of bike racing recently, though mainly only the regional tour - Alzira. The city was the départ for the 2009 stage to Aitana that came two days after the Xàtiva stage (the Valencia ITT on stage 7 sandwiching them). Cadel Evans got a day in the maillot oro before losing it on the bonus seconds the following day in Xorret del Catí, trying to headbutt Robert Gesink in the process after the Australian had not recognized a narrowing in the road, and then accusing David de la Fuente of sitting up to allow Valverde to pass him simply for the purpose of putting El Imbatido in the lead of the race. Following the subsequent inelegant neutral service wheel change on Sierra Nevada, Evans went into sulk mode and didn't even try to depose Valverde from then on; this was the last hurrah of the old excuse-making, race-losing Evans before he got on with the business of going out there and grabbing the bull by the horns, and started putting together the palmarès that his performance level deserved.

The first half of the stage is very flat as we head through the terrain inland of the coastal cities, mainly to avoid disruption in the city of Valencia itself; since we're not stopping there, it would be farcical to block off the centre of a major city like that. Instead we trace the inland roads, stopping by Cheste at the site of the Circuit de Valencia, a motor racing venue not to be confused with the short-lived "street circuit" around the bay that hosted Formula 1 for a brief period in the early 2000s as the sport attempted to capitalise on the Fernando Alonso effect and which hosted the ITT in that 2009 Vuelta (and also in one of my previous Vueltas hosted a sprint); also known as the Circuito Ricardo Tormo after a legendary former champion who died in 1998, this circuit is around three quarters of an hour inland from Valencia itself and is a permanent racing facility which hosts Spain's main motorsport love (and indeed why the Formula 1 authorities felt the need to capitalise on Alonso, because Spain has never truly been a well-tapped market for the sport), motorbike racing. Spain hosts no fewer than four rounds of the current MotoGP calendar, at Jeréz, Montmeló, Motorland Aragón and here at Cheste, and supplies 9 of the 27 riders currently plying their trade in the most illustrious series in the sport; while the European Le Mans Series (precursor to the World Endurance Championship) has also raced here, it is predominantly known for motorcycle racing.

racing-legends-2018-circuit-ricardo-tormo.jpg


Motor racing circuits have been a fairly common stop-off for bike racing over the years, owing to their ability to provide fairly safe sprinting situations and minimise disruption, as they always have ample space for the trappings of races. I've used them a fair amount, but here the Circuito Ricardo Tormo hosts a meta volante only.

Instead we continue along our northward trajectory towards Llíria, which hosted a transitional stage in the 2017 Vuelta to Cuenca, won by Matej Mohoric. This is a similar type of stage to that, something of a Worlds tune-up as it's not an uphill finish and sprinters could make it but it's a test of durability with some tricky enough climbing to challenge. However, none of it is especially steep; climbs in the Comunidad de Valencia region and the Sistema Ibérico inland from here in Castilla-La Mancha and southern Aragón tend to fall into three categories:
- long but uncomplicated, low gradients, such as the Alto del Pino and Javalambre
- medium mountains of varying kinds, like Tudons, Torremanzanas and Carrasqueta
- a little shorter than medium length but severe, like Cumbre del Sol, Xorret del Catí or Más de la Costa.

Climbs that are either of high enough gradients at sustained enough length to challenge, such as Aitana, are few, but besides, we aren't looking at that kind of stage here, so it's not a problem that we take on the lengthy but not especially challenging (other than by distance) Alt de Montmayor. It's a pretty area, around the Puntal de Navarrete, relatively unspoiled as there are few sizable urban areas nearby, and at decent enough altitude close enough to the coast to be lush and verdant thanks to rainfall; it has only been seen once in the Vuelta, in 2004, when José Miguel Elías took the climb from the breakaway. I expect the same outcome (not Elías, but the breakaway) here, given the climb is, although long, not super selective and over 60km from the line.

8055093.jpg


The descent is a bit more complex but takes us down to Segorbe for the second intermediate sprint before the last climbs that will test the endurance of the sprinters. We're not far from the Alt del Garbí, but that's been done recently and also the stage isn't supposed to totally kill off the sprinters, more be an ideal Worlds prep with plenty of opportunity for stagehunters as well as not being too hard for the more durable sprinters. The second of these climbs has been used in the Vuelta a few times, but the first, the Port d'Almedixer if you're Catalanophone and the Puerto de Almedíjar otherwise, is brand new to the national tour, although it has been used in the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana a few times. It's a reasonable cat.2 climb with a number of ramps of 9%, but none of those monster gradients that so often characterise the Vuelta; most of the 9-10% gradient sections are near the top though, which falls just over 30km from the line. Here we're moving through the Sierra de Espadán, one of the less known natural parks in the area, and relatively untapped by racing so it gives us some interesting imagery for the helicams as I would expect this to be where stagehunting breakaways fall apart.

espacio-natural-espadan-1-e1414578791557.jpg


The Puerto de Almedíjar does have some cycling connection, however. But not a pleasant one; it was on a descent of this pass (in the opposite direction to that which the péloton is riding in this projectef stage, so on the side that we are climbing) that in September 2012, the young Euskaltel-Euskadi rider Victor Cabedo, one of very few riders in the pre-2013 era to don the iconic orange but not be from the Basque country, was hit by a car on a training ride and sent flying into a ravine, dying from his injuries at the age of just 23. There are pictures of the fire service recovering the body from the valley, but nobody needs to see those. It was a cruel blow to end a difficult season for the marchers in orange; Cabedo had come to the team via racing for the Seguros Bilbao amateur team and regularly commuting from Comunidad Valenciana to participate in the esteemed Basque-Navarrese amateur scene as well as maintaining his relationship with Dorleta Zorrilla, a young Basque prospect on the women's side of the sport who rode for the long-standing Bizkaia-Durango team but retired from racing in the wake of her partner's death. Joining Orbea, the feeder team for Euskaltel, he impressed with a 5th place in the Klasika Primavera and a top 10 in the tricky national championship road race in Castellón de la Plana, capped with a solo victory in the Vuelta a Asturias which capped his season and secured him a neo-pro contract with the Basques, seen as one of the most promising young riders they had and a potential stagehunter or man for medium mountain races; he had a fairly quiet first pro season, riding the Giro and serving an apprenticeship doing some northern races like the Eneco and the Tour of Britain, the latter of which he crashed out of on September 10th; one week later he went out for a ride back home in Onda, and never returned. There is now a short stage race in the region of Onda and Segorbe dedicated to the young rider, the Trófeo Victor Cabedo, featuring climbs like the Alto de Vistabella and Salto del Caballo, while Victor's younger brother Óscar turned professional this season with Burgos-BH.

vctor-cabedo-356897e7-a726-4a70-bd70-a671eb4ccfe-resize-750.jpg


The descent into Eslida is very technical featuring a number of twists and turns, often very close to one another, so it's a very good opportunity to get out of sight and out of mind for a fugitive, depending on how keen the sprinters' and GC leaders' teams are to chase at this stage of the race. I see this stage as akin to the 2011 stage Pablo Lastras won, in Totana, or while the stage is somewhat harder, a similar kind of expectation for the outcome as the classic Córdoba stages with San Jerónimo or the Murcía stages with Cresta del Gallo. After descending into Eslida, the last climb of the day is the Port d'Eslida, which was in fact featured as recently as 2017, as an early climb in the Sagunt stage, and amounts to the last 5km of this profile - mostly consistent at 6,5% but easing off slightly toward the top, which comes around 20km from the finish. It was first introduced to the Vuelta in 1971, when Txomin Perurena won the climb, before being among the many summits taken by Eddy Merckx in his foray into Spain in 1973. It has only featured twice since, however, in 1987 and 2017, where it wasn't in the position to be decisive, so riders likely won't have too much experience dealing with the run-in under racing conditions. For the most part this opens up with some genuine descending which gradually gets easier, though there is a brief kick up again as we hit the Puerto del Marianet 9km from the line - though the climb from this side really isn't much of a challenge - it's the last 2km of this so a kilometre at 3,5% followed by another at 4% - hardly Xorret del Catí.

304D5D0C0A314D190FD62E4D190F1F.jpg


However, part of this run-in may be familiar to a few riders, having been on the route of the 2011 Spanish national championships in the time trial, of which 5 of the top 10 are still active riders at a high enough level to potentially enter the Vuelta (though do bear in mind this is my 10th Vuelta so in the parallel universe these races inhabit, we're some way from that) - Lluís Mas in 9th, Gorka Izagirre in 6th, Jesús Herrada in 4th, Jonathan Castroviejo in 2nd and eventual winner Luís León Sánchez. The aforementioned Victor Cabedo, riding on his local roads, was 10th. Alejandro Marque was 5th and is still active but is unlikely to reach a level where riding the Vuelta is a possibility given that he had that controversial AAF that led to a premature termination of his Movistar contract (possibly unfairly, as it appeared Movistar publicised the firing just in time to free up the funds to sign the much more well-known Igor Antón), he's only ever raced on Portuguese continental teams and he's now 36 years old.

La%20Vall%20desde%20%20PIPA.jpg


I've used La Vall d'Uixó in my Vueltas before, but only as a stage start; it featured in my "best medium mountain Vuelta ever!" 5th edition, featuring brutal sawtoothed medium mountains in stages to Bilbao, Oviedo, A Pontenova and San Lorenzo de El Escorial, while the most difficult mountaintop finish was indeed in the stage beginning in Vall d'Uixó - Valdelinares. As a result here the cameras can perhaps pick up a bit more of the city's charm; sitting at the foot of the Sierra de Espadán it lies between the coastal beaches of Castellón province and the mountains, and with nearly 35.000 inhabitants is one of the largest urban areas of the province. Like other cities such as Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria or Amorebieta-Etxano in the Basque country, La Vall d'Uixó has two confluent city centres as two adjacent towns merged into it; unlike them, however, those names do not survive on. Its most famous cycling son is Eduardo Castelló, who won the national championships and the Vuelta a Asturias in 1971, but is perhaps best known for winning a dramatic Vuelta stage in 1968 where Felice Gimondi took the race lead off of fan favourite José Pérez-Francés, escaping on the descent of the Puerto de Orduña, and taking advantage of Ferrys' lack of numbers once the notoriously temperamental Catalan had dropped his teammates on the climb while contesting the climb with the Italian.

The city is also well-known for cave paintings and one of the most spectacular cave networks in Europe, including the largest subterranean navigable river in the continent; we pass the Cueva de Sant Josep on the way into the town for the run-in so this will look pretty scenic; the town is in the process of trying to establish itself as a tourist destination so this will be an ideal way to show some of the sights with the mountains, the caves, the Roman aqueduct remains and of course the views down to the Mediterranean - the scenery of the last 40-50km here should be nice but also relatively unknown to much of the international audience of the race.

812278069463fefef1e64999cb60a06e.jpg


If the péloton is active and wants to contest this one in the bunch (with not too many chances for sprinters yet, a few may want to pick this one up for the points competition), this stage is likely to go to the likes of Michael Matthews, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Nacer Bouhanni, Matteo Trentin and so on - not so much Peter Sagan, but only because he has stayed away from the Vuelta after his run-in with a race motorbike in the 2015 edition. If he were to turn up, he'd instantly be one of the favourites for a stage like this. Spain's tendency to produce durable sprinters given the lack of real flat stages in the national calendar means there may be some home interest depending on who makes it into the race - Lobato if he gets back to the top level, Carlos Barbero, Eduard Prades for example now that the Spaniards have multiple wildcard teams now.
 
Sorry for the delay, but i think i finally have a modified version of the tour i sort of posted month ago ready. It's a 3 mountain block variant. I had Genève as my grand départ but i found it plasticky and souless. Hence i decided to move back to a much nicer place - Évian-les-Bains. That does make it quite clunky as the first stage features a fair bit of Switzerland and not that much of Haute-Savoie. The main theme of this Tour is "reanimation" - trying to find some life in what seems dead areas. I hope i will manage to do this relatively quickly but i don't know how much time the Tour will take off me. For now i guess i'll tune in for the cobbled stage, La Rosiere, Portet with maybe the Laruns one to at least laugh at Aubisque east being HC.

If you follow me then you may saw a fair number of recent Italian stages as i'm working with my last ever Giro that i'm planning on posting here. It starts in Malta which is a beautiful set of islands and mostly features stages that i would like to see (no catch or gimmick). Of course this Giro is in very early stage so there may be some changes in the future.
 
Libertine Seguros said:
Stage 5: Xàtiva - La Vall d'Uixò, 202km



The first half of the stage is very flat as we head through the terrain inland of the coastal cities, mainly to avoid disruption in the city of Valencia itself; since we're not stopping there, it would be farcical to block off the centre of a major city like that. Instead we trace the inland roads, stopping by Cheste at the site of the Circuit de Valencia, a motor racing venue not to be confused with the short-lived "street circuit" around the bay that hosted Formula 1 for a brief period in the early 2000s as the sport attempted to capitalise on the Fernando Alonso effect and which hosted the ITT in that 2009 Vuelta (and also in one of my previous Vueltas hosted a sprint); also known as the Circuito Ricardo Tormo after a legendary former champion who died in 1998, this circuit is around three quarters of an hour inland from Valencia itself and is a permanent racing facility which hosts Spain's main motorsport love (and indeed why the Formula 1 authorities felt the need to capitalise on Alonso, because Spain has never truly been a well-tapped market for the sport), motorbike racing. Spain hosts no fewer than four rounds of the current MotoGP calendar, at Jeréz, Montmeló, Motorland Aragón and here at Cheste, and supplies 9 of the 27 riders currently plying their trade in the most illustrious series in the sport; while the European Le Mans Series (precursor to the World Endurance Championship) has also raced here, it is predominantly known for motorcycle racing.
Ah, a mention of the Valencia street circuit. Alonso's fantastic win in '12. It was great to watch for an Alonso fan like me.
 
Stage 6: Teruel - Zaragoza, 175km

jsNNgE9.jpg


qxqzqy5.png


Yes, with the news not filling me with joy in the real world of cycling, it's time to take solace in the make-believe fantasy world in which my Vueltas take place. Ironically enough, given the woeful start to the Tour, this is the second out of six stages thus far in Vuelta number 10 which has had absolutely zero categorized climbs.

That's not to say it will be an easy day, mind - though it may be, depending on whether the weather wants to play ball or not. We begin in the city of Teruel, Spain's smallest provincial capital with just 35.000 inhabitants to Soria's 40.000. Aragón is not a region of large cities; Huesca is also one of the country's smallest provincial capitals, though we are headed toward the more significantly-sized regional capital, Zaragoza. There are a few unusual features about Teruel due to its comparatively isolated location; it is the only mainland provincial capital that is not directly linked to Madrid by rail (the Canarias capitals can be reached by plane, which Teruel can't, but Ceuta and Melilla do not have direct links to Madrid either), and the sparse population of this corner of the peninsula, isolated from the coastal affluence in Comunidad Valenciana and southern Catalunya by the Sistema Ibérico, coupled with the rugged terrain in that area and the difficult transport links to central Spain, led to the Tourist board of the region launching a desperate bid to boost tourism in the area under the slogan ¡Teruel existe! ("Teruel exists").

escalinata-teruel-espana.jpg


But that's not to say that Teruel does not have plenty to offer the tourist; after all, it's a leading part of the UNESCO World Heritage site that is the Mudéjar Architecture of Aragón. As a result there is all manner of spectacular moorish scenery, with buildings and stairways in that style preserved perfectly because it's higher up in the mountains than many of the other Islamic architecture of the al-Andalus era down in the Andalucian pueblos blancos. Even the Catholic architecture of the city is built in the Mudéjar style, so it remains a relatively uniform city aesthetically which helps in keeping with the beauty of it, with towers and church spires of the late middle ages all perfectly thematically aligned with the 12th Century old town. Much of it was damaged in the Civil War, with a year-long battle around the city taking place which saw casualties totalling four times the city's current population. And in those nearby mountains there are some impressive dinosaur bones.

Not that we'll be seeing much of them, as we're staying on the meseta, on a stage that gradually tilts its way down toward sea level, so may well be a chance to challenge the stage speed record, what with the stage featuring no climbs at all and with a stage finish some 800m lower than the start. If the weather doesn't play ball, however, this is going to be one of "those" Vuelta stages. Teruel typically hosts stages of that kind, on those rare occasions that the Vuelta remembers that, like the slogan, Teruel exists. The race hasn't been back since it was the start town of a flat stage in 2005 won by Max van Heeswijk, and the last time it hosted a stage finish was 1999, when an intermediate stage headed over small climbs inland from Valencia, and saw Frank Vandenbroucke outdo Jon Odriozola in a two-up sprint from the breakaway, four minutes ahead of the remainder of their break group and 12 minutes ahead of the péloton.

photo-16.jpeg


With the recent rejuvenation of the Vuelta a Aragón, however, Teruel has returned to cycling for the first time in over a decade this season, with the start of the Caspe stage of the reborn race, a stage which was won by Jon Aberasturi for the Euskadi-Murias team. In my fictitious Vueltas, it has appeared twice - in the very first Vuelta as a start for a transitional stage inland to Cuenca, and in the 8th as both the finish of an intermediate stage along the lines of that 1999 stage but somewhat tougher, featuring the Collado de las Matanzas 35km from the line, and the start of a subsequent flat stage, albeit slightly different (more difficult) than this one.

This stage traces a fair bit of that subsequent stage, running parallel to the new motorway which links Zaragoza to Sagunto, and which will serve as the main means for the transfer of 100km or so to get here. I've put an early meta volante in Monreal del Campo in the hope of incentivizing a hard beginning to the stage, possibly in the quest for the points jersey, and to make a good fight to get into the break. In fact, apart from a brief rolling stretch from Daroca to Pañiza, this one is almost entirely along one plateau that gradually saunters downhill, being as it is on the Meseta where it drops away to the lowland plains of Zaragoza. The early part of the stage will be classic Vuelta terrain; scorched countryside and villages reduced to skeleton populations, as rapid depopulation in favour of more successful industrial areas has rendered many of them only seasonally occupied.

Panoramica-de-Daroca-970x644.jpg


I would expect to see a small breakaway riding away several minutes up on the bunch in this one, but there's always the possibility that there could be somewhat more action, as the plains once we pass through the foothills around Daroca and the vineyards around Cariñena, which is a Denominación de Origén certification, can be susceptible to wind; fields are often not bounded by fencing or shrubbery, leaving very open and potentially windswept areas. It isn't as volatile an area as Albacete, which of course has its legendary reputation in Vuelta history, but there are still possibilities en route to the provincial capital which will prove our stage finish as it has done so many times in the history of the third Grand Tour.

img_cabecera_05.jpg


Aragón's regional capital hasn't seen the Vuelta since 2008, when Sébastien Hinault won a sprint, but it has seen the Vuelta a Aragón this year, with a similar outcome won by Matteo Malucelli of Androni Giocattoli. Before this layoff though, it was a relatively in-vogue city for the national race; Sergei Outschakov won a stage around the city in 1999, Petacchi won a sprint in an similar but shorter stage a year later, Igor González de Galdeano won a reduced sprint the following year, Petacchi returned to the top of the table in 2003 and continued his domination in the city a year later, while the city went German in 2007, Erik Zabel winning a sprint and Bert Grabsch a time trial.

It was in fact a host all the way back in the first Vuelta, in 1935, as Mariano Cañardo, one of Spain's first cycling heroes, took his first Vuelta stage in a 264km from the Basque coast here that year; other winners over the years in Zaragoza include Bernardo Ruíz, Rik van Steenbergen, Jan Janssen, Roger Pingeon, Régis Clère, José Luís Laguía, Roger de Vlaeminck, Eddy Planckaert, Íñaki Gastón, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov and Laurent Jalabert, but the undisputed king in the city is Delio Rodríguez, who took three separate Vuelta stages in to Zaragoza in the race's formative years. With a population of over 700.000, the city is 20 times the size of its fellow provincial capital earlier in the stage, and is the fifth largest in Spain, concentrating a huge amount of the population of Aragón (over half, in fact) into the one conurbation - it is also the country's largest city without a La Liga football team, since Real Zaragoza are going through some serious doldrums at present; they've long been also-rans at the top level, save for a shocking win in the 1995 European Cup Winners' Cup, a defunct competition that has been rather swallowed whole by the Champions' League, which they won over the English team Arsenal, thanks to a spectacular desperation shot from distance from Nayim, one of the most famous Ceutanos of modern times, and who they had signed from Arsenal's deadly rivals two years earlier, in the dying seconds of the match, which seemed otherwise destined for a penalty shoot-out. They had qualified for the competition following one of their many successes in the Copa del Rey, most recently winning the competition in 2004, but in recent years the days of plenty seem fairly distant for them as they bounce between the top two divisions at present.

I've included Zaragoza three times previously in my Vueltas - mostly as transitional flat stages, either as a finish or a start. The first time was back in the second Vuelta, the most innovative and experimental of them, so there's some nice symmetry with the use here; then it was used in the fourth Vuelta as the final flat stage - that one started in Morocco and finished in Barcelona - and finally in the eighth as the stage start for a stage which deliberately cloned in its entirety the legendary 1972 Formigal stage over Monrepós that birthed the legend of El Tarangú. Here it's just a flat stage, but a potentially tough one, as if the wind does blow, that slight downhill nature of the stage means the pace should be ferocious...

zaragoza--409149-0.jpg
 
Stage 7: Calahorra - Estación de Esquí Valle del Sol, 186km

FR4rPXv.jpg


20C21JV.png


GPM:
Alto del Pontón (Lagunas de Neila)(cat.1) 7,0km @ 8,4%
Puerto del Manquillo (cat.3) 4,6km @ 5,4%
Estación de Esquí Valle del Sol (cat.3) 3,8km @ 7,1%

After a motorway transfer from the Aragonese capital to the eastern edges of La Rioja, we have another medium mountain stage that introduces us to the northwest corner of the Sistema Ibérico, and onto comparatively familiar terrain for the riders in that the Vuelta's main warmup race at present is of course the Vuelta a Burgos, and we will be finishing in the province today, on the kind of short uphill finish that the Vuelta a Burgos loves. Calahorra, which serves as today's start town, has no tradition as a finish in the Vuelta, but it has served as a start town three times in recent memory, usually resulting in sprints - my stage here will probably end up being a much more significant stage than Calahorra usually gets to see; in 2007 a stage from Calahorra to Zaragoza served as a transitional stage before the first 'real' mountains other than the absurdly early stage 4 Lagos de Covadonga finish, and was won by Erik Zabel; a year later the direction was different but the characteristics were the same, with Óscar Freire triumphing, while the slightly tougher version used in the 2013 Vuelta reduced the group fighting the finish out to 35, although most major contenders made the selection and Bauke Mollema was triumphant.

Calahorra itself is an ancient settlement, having been settled long before the Romans arrived in 187 BC, renamed it Calagurris Fibularia, and made it their administrative centre for the surrounding regions, including places such as Clunia which has featured in earlier Vueltas of mine and the real-life Vuelta a Burgos. It was during Roman times that the city gained its patron saints, too, as San Emeterio and San Celedonio were both martyred in the city (San Emeterio may also have been born there, records are poor). It also has a rare distinction of having a twin town in Western Sahara, having entered an arrangement with the town of Haussa.

calahorra_aerea.jpg


The first half of the stage winds its way along the vineyards of Rioja Baja, over rolling terrain that is susceptible to baking heat. We pass the Museo Würth, a treasure trove of modern art sponsored by the German manufacturing concern that also sponsored the controversial Liberty Seguros cycling team prior to Operación Puerto, as part of their ongoing cultural ties (the museum, not the cycling sponsorship, though they also sponsored the Tour de Suisse for a couple of years at the same time), and then have an early intermediate sprint which will come possibly even less than an hour into the stage, in the capital of La Rioja, Logroño.

d16086eb-7128-1bbd-aa9e-61095ac6c547.jpg


As we know well now, Logroño loves to host the Vuelta in recent years, with stages in the city in three of the last six editions. Two of these (2012 and 2014) were characterless circuit races, unfortunately, which made for painfully dull viewing, especially in 2012 when not one single, solitary rider was willing to help Andalucía-Caja Granada's Javier Chacón try to foil the inevitable sprint, which was won by John Degenkolb. The German duplicated his success two years later, but when the race returned to Logroño in 2017 it was as the finish town of the race's key ITT, which was of course won in the red jersey by Chris Froome to underscore his now spectacularly controversial triumph. It also has a sometimes uneasy relationship with the selective policies of the Basques in sports given its proximity; while the region is undeniably Spanish, there do remain Basque remnants in place names such as Ezcaray, and of course the southern face of the Montes Vascos cascade down to Rioja Alavesa, a Basque wine region which runs almost into Logroño itself, so there is an element of cultural cross-pollination with the neighbouring Basques, even if Araba is easily the least vocal Basque province in terms of separatism and protectionism. For example, Logroño is one of the strongest bastions of pelota vasca, with a number of elite players in the regionally-popular sport coming from La Rioja - most notably the legendary Augusto Ibáñez Sacristán, better known by his pelota name "Titin III" (many pelotariak adopt names referencing their 'dynasties' where they belong to a family line of competitors especially where nicknames or family names are especially common), a veteran former champion who was still competing at the top level well into his 40s and whose likeness emblazons the rear wall of Logroño's frontón. Further uneasy cross-pollination concerns the footballer David López Moreno, who was signed by Athletic Bilbao in 2007 causing great debate throughout the Basque region as to whether the Riojano was really suitable for the squad and whether he could meet the stringent cantera policy of the team.

We do not cross into País Vasco here, however, and instead continue through Navarrete and Nájera, two towns famous for a battle in the 14th century as part of a Castilian Civil war, before turning southwards to enter the Sistema Ibérico. This mountain range is only sporadically seen in the Vuelta owing to its comparative isolation, the fact that there are only a small handful of mountain stations with the space and money available to pay for it, and that many of the climbs are very gradual in nature which makes them less selective. Through the formative years of the race, they were often bypassed, and almost never featured during the El Correo-El Pueblo Vasco era, on the basis that the race would usually need some flatter stages at that point to transition from either the Asturian mountains or the Pyrenees before the traditional finishes in Euskadi. The region did, however, see a period of activity from their local Grand Tour, beginning in 1988 when the Valdezcaray ski station paid up for the first time to host a finish, which was won by Séan Kelly. The nature of the climb - a few decent gradient kilometres followed by several of false flat - meant that it wasn't ideally suited to road stages, so the following year a MTT followed, won by Périco Delgado, then the reigning Tour de France champion, underpinning his GC triumph that year (though he had to wait another day to wrest the jersey off the shoulders of Martin Farfán). The cronoescalada was duplicated the following years, won by Jeff Bernard in 1990 and Fabio Parrá in 1991, before in 1993, its more sinister sibling, the Alto Cruz de la Demanda, was discovered and took on the role as MTF par excellence in the region, becoming the Swiss mountain, with Tony Rominger winning twice in its first two appearances, then followed by Alex Zülle in 1996. Home favourite José María Jiménez won in 2001 in one of his last ever victories, then the region was dead to the Vuelta until the 2012 race brought back the Valdezcaray climb as part of a road stage, to similarly uneventful conclusions as back in the 80s - the only real things of note about the stage were Sky proving their hypocrisy by attacking Valverde when the race leader crashed in exactly the same fashion that they had been upset by Movistar doing in Paris-Nice, and Marcos García of Caja Rural not realising the break had been up the road and celebrating a fairly anonymous placement.

For that reason, therefore, no big Riojan mountains... we're crossing over to Burgos for a climb much more familiar to the modern cycling fan. Even though it has only featured once in the Vuelta (in 1998, won once more by Chava like, well, most mountain stages that year), the name of Lagunas de Neila resonates pretty strongly among fans of Spanish cycling. For as long as most of us can remember it has been the keynote climb of the Vuelta's pre-eminent warmup race, and has produced some spectacular fireworks over the years. There are multiple ways to the summit, with the Vuelta a Burgos typically coming to an arrangement such as this, where they climb from Quintanar de la Sierra up to the Puerto del Collado, descend into Neila then climb from the north as far as the El Pontón or Pasil de Rozavientos junctions, descend the more gradual 'old road' back down to Quintanar de la Sierra and then repeat only going to the summit this time. It's time honoured and difficult, but it does neglect to note that there is an even harder road, that directly connects the Puerto del Collado to the summit. It was this road that was taken in the 1998 stage, which you can see here. Obviously they climbed from Quintanar de la Sierra, but you can see the all important section between the Puerto del Collado and the summit there.

Neila3.gif


What we are in effect doing is climbing all of that, as far as the sign for El Pontón, although I have only categorised it from km 10,8 to 17,8, which averages nearly 8,5% and features 2km averaging 11,5% toward the end. It's a hard and inconsistent climb with numerous ramps that can create suffering, so I have given it a tenuous cat.1 classification, to try to incentivise some action given it's just 46km from the line. I don't suspect it will be the platform for any really relevant attacks other than for the stage, but it will certainly rid riders of a lot of helpers.

12221202BQ.jpg


The descent is on the road that we typically see climbed in the Vuelta a Burgos, so there is an uncategorized climb in the middle of the difficult descent - around 2km at 5,5% so nothing too difficult but enough to break up the rhythm. The earlier moves and high pace is further incentivized by the bonus seconds available at the sprint in Huerta de Arriba at the base of the descent. There's then a fairly simple run-in; the riders first take on the fairly gradual Puerto del Manquillo, a somewhat benign ascent cresting 11km from the finish, but where apart from an early 400m ramp of around 8% nothing should really challenge the riders, and then after a brief and mostly straight descent towards Pineda de la Sierra, we have the final climb, a short but potentially selective grind up to the small Valle del Sol ski station.

D7A27CCB-9221-F5B3-2B068C4364CE52B3.JPG


This small ski station has only hosted professional racing once before, in the 2015 Vuelta a Burgos, when Miguel Ángel López won with a narrow margin over Daniel Moreno and Pierre Latour in a stage that climbed into the valley from the opposite side, turning the final few kilometres into an ascent on the end of an everlasting false flat. The actual climb itself is not that difficult, but it's long enough that it can be selective if needed. Especially seeing as Neila ought to have got rid of a lot of helpers or at least exhausted them enough to limit their usefulness on a short sharp finish like this.

VALLE_DEL_SOL.gif


With its steepest ramps at the bottom, this should hopefully become mano a mano before too long, but I do believe that it's more likely the gaps will only be of a few seconds here. It's certainly not as difficult a finish as Las Canteras de Cocentaína, and with the weekend coming up riders will also be wary of working too hard here. But it's a potential banana skin of a stage in a relatively uncharted section of eastern Burgos.

9ef1d8be5a5a20f7b33b82a9eaeaa6e4.jpg
 
Jun 30, 2014
7,060
2
0
Visit site
I've decided to bring back the Bayern Rundfahrt, it's gonna be a hard race with 5 stages, but not a single MTF, so the climbers will be forced to attack after the mid length opening ITT. I've tried to create a race that is similar to Itzulia/Pais Vasco, so mostly shorter, but steep climbs.
I'll keep the stage descriptions rather short, I'm working on an important paper, so I'm already doing more than enough writing on a day to day basis. :D

Stage 1: Bayreuth ITT; 27.5km
stage11.png

stage12.png

The race starts with an opening ITT in Bayreuth that features an gentle uphill section, 2.5km at 3.5% and a descent in the central part, but it should still be an ITT for the specialists.
It starts in front of the Markgräflichen Opernhaus/Margravial Opera House and end on the Parking lot of the Festspielhaus, so we have an opera themed ITT that is clearly a tribute to Richard Wagner and his work as a composer, I don't want to talk about him as a human being and his believes, everybody knows about that, so I won't open that can of worms.
Markgräfliches Opernhaus:
markgraefliches-opernhaus-bayreuth_aussen.jpg


The Festspielhaus:
festspielhaus-bayreuth-122~_h-558_v-img__16__9__xl_w-994_-e1d284d92729d9396a907e303225e0f2d9fa53b4.jpg
 
Jun 30, 2014
7,060
2
0
Visit site
Stage 2: Bayreuth – Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz; 159km
stage21.png

stage22.png

The first road stage of my Bayern Rundfahrt is a shorter stage that features a hilly finishing circuit after an easy first half. That should give attackers a decent shoot and favour the sprinters that do well in hard one day races over the pure sprinters, guys like Sagan, Colbrelli and Matthews vs. One day racers with a good sprint like Gilbert and GvA.
The riders will ride 4 laps on the short finishing circuit, the central part of the circuit is the Höhenberg, 2.7km at 5.5%, the climb tops with only 5.5km to go and that's mostly downhill, even if it's a rather shallow gradient, that should favour attackers.

Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz:
image.jpg

AK-Ansichtskarte-Neumarkt-Oberpfalz-Hauptstrasse-mit-Rathaus-Kat-Neumarkt-idOPf.jpg
 
Stage 8: Villarcayo - Sotres-Cabrales (Jito d'Escarandí), 190km

T2U2ar9.jpg


sxXEd6H.png


GPM:
Puerto de Palombera (cat.3) 6,1km @ 5,4%
Collada de Carmona (cat.3) 4,9km @ 7,2%
Collada Ozalba (cat.3) 6,0km @ 6,7%
Collada de Hoz (cat.2) 7,7km @ 5,8%
Jito d'Escarandí (cat.ESP) 14,4km @ 7,6%

The second weekend starts with what you could argue is the first 'real' mountain stage, though it's mainly about the MTF, with the final climb of the day clearly dwarfing all of those that precede it. The stage moves from Burgos to Asturias via Cantabria, and begins in Villarcayo, or, to give it its full name, Villarcayo de Merindad de Castilla la Vieja. This small town of 4.000 inhabitants is nestled in the north of the Provincia de Burgos, close to the Monumento Nacional de Ojo Guareña, and is a common stopping-off point for the Vuelta a Burgos, normally to allow some flatter stages in that puncheur-favouring warmup race. Most recent winners in the town are Lloyd Mondory in 2014 and Danny van Poppel in 2016.

6E7F11FF-AA44-A3EA-C3B58CE4A5A95EDA.JPG


It was close between Villarcayo and neighbouring Medina de Pomar which I would choose to be the stage host, but one thing tipped it in the favour of Villarcayo - it is the hometown of Íñigo Cuesta, who currently holds the records for most consecutive Vueltas contested, with an unbroken streak from 1994, when he turned pro with the Euskadi-Petronor team, through to 2010 when at the age of 41 he had his last Grand Tour, with the Cervélo team. He retired in 2011 after his Caja Rural team did not achieve wildcard selection for the race in their first year as a ProContinental outfit. Our final memory of the 1998 País Vasco winner as an active cyclist, therefore, is his appearance in the first Marxa 100% Xavi Tondó, alongside Josep Jufre, Joaquím Rodríguez and a number of other pros. During his time as a pro, however, as well as Euskadi (before Euskaltel took over) he rode for ONCE, Cofidis, Saunier Duval, Team CSC and Cervélo (quite a hitlist in retrospect, hey?) with very few actual wins - a stage in the Dauphiné here, a stage of Catalunya there - and at the end of his career his streak of unbroken Vueltas was perhaps the most famous thing about him, but he was a very respected helper at his peak, with a best Vuelta finish of 13th in 2001.

109459.jpg


After an initial uncategorised ascent of the Alto del Repetidor (hey, I've got to have some fun, and this should mean a strong break) - km 0 is basically at the start of the steep section! - the main next role is to ride across from Burgos into Cantabria and skirt the shores of the Embalse de Ebro. This is fairly common to the Vuelta owing to the historic stages into Reinosa over the Puerto del Escudo, but we're not approaching from the north so no sign of that legendary ascent today. Instead it's a rolling ride into Reinosa, with a scenic backdro, to allow the breakaway to consolidate its advantage.

embalse_ebro-1440x564_c.jpg


After heading through Reinosa, where an early intermediate sprint takes place, we turn northwards and head out of the meseta via the Puerto de Palombera, by its much shorter, more straightforward southern face. At 6,1km @ 5,4% it's far from devastating, the final 4km are at 7% but it's pretty reasonable as a first test. It has never been seen from this side in the Vuelta; the three occasions it has been used - in 1976 and 2007 stages to Reinosa, and as a stopping point on the way to the Alto Campoo in 1985, the same way as the first time I have used the climb in a Vuelta, in my very first design way back when - have been from the much longer northern side. In the fantasy world these designs inhabit, however, we have seen the southern face of Palombera - once, in my 6th Vuelta, in a similar but easier stage to Cueva el Soplao.

Instead, we descend through these lengthy, undulating roads towards Cabezón de la Sal, before turning left into a succession of smaller climbs through an area of western Cantabria in which dialect is much stronger, possibly under influence from neighbouring Asturianu. The first of these three back to back ascents is the Collada Carmona (locally the Collá), a fairly straightforward ascent of just under 5km at 7% with a steepest kilometre just over 8%. It's a very old climb in the Vuelta, first crested by Julián Berrendero in 1942, and also led by some other legends, such as Luís Ocaña in 1976, one of the great champions' last attempts to recapture former glories, Emilio Rodríguez in 1947, and Joaquím Rodríguez in 2005, long before the legend of Purito's Muritos was born and he was a stagehunting KOM. It was included - as part of this chain of three - in the 2017 Santo Toribio de Liébana stage, which was ostensibly an attempt to recapture the magic of the 2012 Fuente Dé stage, with a punchier climb, but wound up being possibly the most controversial single stage since Val Martello - and possibly all the way back to Morzine '06 - as it was here that Chris Froome, despite a malfunctioning kidney and breathing difficulties, was able to somehow completely innocently take back all the time he'd lost the previous day on a much harder stage, thanks to his body's unique salbutamol-processing tempo.

As you will see from the 2017 stage, this next set of climbs chain together almost perfectly, so after a bit of food in Puentenansa the riders are ready to head uphill again, on the Colláu Jozalba (better known as Collada Ozalba). A relatively consistent climb, this one was only introduced to the race in the mid 1980s despite how perfectly it links to the much older Collada Carmona. And after that, it's the unexpected icon of Alberto Contador.

HozE.gif


7,7km @ 5,8% really isn't a beast. Introduced to the race in 1976, it was first won by later Liège-Bastogne-Liège winner Sepp Fuchs, and he remained the biggest name to take the climb until Rodríguez in 2005; since then David Moncoutié and Luís León Sánchez have been first over it, with Marc Soler the one to crest it most recently thanks to a somewhat speculative attack in that 2017 stage. But while Moncoutié may have been first over the summit in 2012, it was what happened behind that is why the Hoz is an unexpected legend.

0001190669.jpg


With Joaquím Rodríguez' Катюша domestiques having had to control the race all the way since stage 5, the benign stage to Fuente Dé was something of an unnecessary 'bonus' MTF, on a shallow slope, expected to have a similarly 'bleh' effect to the similarly placed Peio Terme stage in the 2010 Giro. But how wrong we were, as Alberto Contador took out his history book and manufactured a Roberto Heras 2005 triumph, sending three teammates into the break (Movistar also had two plus a third rider in the counter attack, which helped it work), before launching an attack 55km from the line, with his teammates to ride across to, along with an ex-teammate, Paolo Tiralongo, whose help he could count on thanks to long term deal-brokering after he gifted the veteran his first career win, on Macugnaga in the 2011 Giro. Purito's troops were caught on the hop and suddenly the race was turned upside down. And somehow this great climber, who has won multiple times on the Angliru, who has won 5 official and 7 unofficial Grand Tours, has his legacy hewn not on Angliru, not on Zoncolan, on Stelvio, the Mortirolo, Alpe d'Huez, Mont Ventoux or Lagos de Covadonga, not even on Bola del Mundo, which was introduced to cycling in his honour, but instead on this relatively unassuming, unthreatening cat.2 ascent in western Cantabria. It's rather like Federico Bahamontes, who has countless legendary exploits on the most famous climbs that France has to offer, but will forever be remembered for something that happened not on the Tourmalet, the Galibier or the Iseran, but on the Col de Romeyère.

12_collado_hoz1.jpg


Being as this is the first serious mountain stage of the race and the Hoz is 65km from the line - further than that day in fact - I don't expect that we would see any Contador-esque riding just yet. Instead, we have a descent and then a lengthy period of flat as we cross from Cantabria into Asturias and the base of the Picos de Europa national park.

Main.JPG


Supposedly named because they were the first things that sailors from the New World would see of Europe when returning, it remains to be seen what direction they would supposedly have been arriving from for Asturias to be the first thing they see but the folk etymology is all we have so let's go with it. The Picos are one of Spain's natural wonders and renowned for their incredible hiking potential and comparatively unspoilt nature. Of course, they are most known to cycling fans for the notorious ascent to Lagos de Covadonga, but there's much else that is on offer - perhaps not of comparable difficulty, but the Puertos de Pandetrave and Panderruedas are completely unused, the long and gradual Puerto del Pontón has only been used in transitional stages away from the north coast in the 1980s, and the classically-styled Puerto de San Glorio was only introduced to the race in 2014. There was of course one other super-sized Picos de Europa climb that, for years, had gone completely unknown to racing, and that fans were crying out for, and that's the Jito d'Escarandí.

Puerto-Jito-de-Escarandi-Final-in%C3%A9dito-Vuelta-a-Espa%C3%B1a-2015.gif


Located in the scenic Cabrales valley, famous for its iconic blue cheese, a strong and intense variety which is matured in the abundant caves of the region and a protected designation of origin in the EU. The scenery is remarkable and the climb is difficult, featuring not one but two sections where multiple kilometres get up above the 9% mark consecutively.

2qa3jap.png


I wrote about Jito d'Escarandí back in April 2014 in the "21 ESP climbs the Vuelta should use" thread, and that post is here. Key points include its similarity to Isola 2000 but less consistent - however with a very similar beginning - and with more steep ramps, the scenic nature of the gorge that leads to it, and the monstrous section up and through Sotres which includes maximum ramps of 19% and 3km at around 10%.

Of course, in the time since I wrote that, the Vuelta has used the climb, in the 2015 race, where for reasons unknown it was only given cat.1 status whereas the significantly easier Fuente del Chivo was rated cat.ESP.

stage-15-profile.jpg


Now, as you can see, this was very much a one-climb stage as there's not much of comparable size that you could put close enough to Jito d'Escarandí to make it anything but, if anything it's even worse than Lagos de Covadonga in that respect, but if you want to relive it you can watch here. Warning, though: the racing was slightly disappointing as everybody waited for the steep section through the village of Sotres itself, which led to a victory for Purito, ahead of Rafał Majka and his loyal helper Daniel Moreno; race leader Fabio Aru followed in with Quintana and Landa, while Tom Dumoulin lost 36" in the closing kilometres as the opposition failed to put him in sufficient difficulty to prevent him taking the leader's jersey back in the ensuing ITT.

However, it doesn't have to be a tame stage, and with this being the only really serious MTF until pretty late in the race, they will have to be incentivised to make more of a race of this. The Alto de las Canteras should give an idea for who has the explosivity on steep gradients, but this one will tell you who has the climbing nous and endurance to make it happen. This is the ideal role for a climb like this, which was somewhat wasted as stage 15, neutralising some of the racing on preceding stages but not producing the goods itself, rather akin to Sierra de La Pandera in 2009. Here, there's little precedent and it should allow the GC contenders to test each other out for the first time properly, rather than the jockeying for smaller time gaps that there will have been to date.

15687_16.jpg
 
Jun 30, 2014
7,060
2
0
Visit site
Stage 3:Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz – Munich; 180km
stage31.png

stage32.png

A sprint stage that features a single small climb, other than that it's all flat and should end with a big sprint in Munich, near the University clinic (the TU clinic to be exact), the final 500m are around 2.5% steep.
This one is the calm before the storm, after a mid lenght ITT and a hillier stage we have one for the pure sprinters before entering the mountains on the last 2 stages.
 
Jun 30, 2014
7,060
2
0
Visit site
Stage 4: Garching – Berchtesgaden; 187km
stage41.png

stage42.png

This one is the longest stage of my Bayern Rundfahrt and the first real climbing test.
The stage starts in Garching near Munich, and for the first 136km the riders will ride southeastwards, no proper climbs, but a decent amount of rolling terrain.
After that we have the first clim of the day, Pass Hallthurn, 7km at 3.4%, nothing but a somewhat decent warm-up for the other 2 climbs.
The following descent isn't too technical and more of a false flat, but right after it the next climb starts, Hochschwarzeck, 6.2km at 6.5%. Apparently Cronoescalade thinks that it should be a cat. 1 climb, I disagree with that, cat. 2 would probably be a better fit for this climb. Yes, the first 2.3km of the climb are at 11.6% with over 20% steep ramps, but after that you have a short false flat section and the 2nd half of the climb is easier.
After the descent you have 8km of slightly downhill false flat, then the final climb of the day starts, Hinterbrand, 5km at 11.2% with ramps up to 20%, a nasty shorter climb.
HinterbrandW.gif

On top of the climb you have 6km that are more of a false flat than an actual descent, then the steep part of the descent starts, it's not very technical, but you shouldn't underestimate it.
The stage ends in Berchtesgaden right after the descent.
The false flat section and the descent from right to left:
HinterbrandE.gif

This is the first real test for the climbers, the final climb is steep enough to create gaps, but the false flat section on top of the climb and the steep descent add another element, so maybe the TT specialists not named Dumoulin or Roglic will be able to limit their losses.
Still, we should get action on the final climb and it should be an interesting final.
Berchtesgaden:
The_Watzman_8-15-2010.jpg

1024px-Berchtesgaden.jpg
 
Jun 30, 2014
7,060
2
0
Visit site
Stage 5: Berchtesgaden – Bischofswiesen; 124km
stage51.png

stage52.png

This short stage is the final stage of the race and it's filled with steep ramps. Right at the start we have the hardest climb of the whole race, the only HC climbs, the Rossfeld Panoramastraße, 12.5km at 8.%, a hard climb and with something like that you can pretty much bet your house on the fact that many strong climbers will try to enter the breakaway, it should be a proper fight and the start of the stage could be pretty hard.
RossfeldS.gif

rossfeld-panoramastrasse3-thcontentgalleryresponsive.jpg

After a 10km long, steep descent we have 8km of false flat before crossing the Austrian Border for the first time, then 7km of false flat before the start of the next climb, Hackwald. 2.5km at 7.2%, but the climb features a section at 22%, it shouldn't be underestimated.
The next 34km mainly feature rolling Terrain, after 4km we're back in Germany, 16km afterwards the riders will cross the Austrian border once again.
Now things get interesting, the rather unknown Hirschbichl Pass starts, 7.4km at 8.5%, but irregular with many steep ramps and durning the 2nd half of the climb you have a section at 30%, that's just nasty.
Overall the following descent isn't as steep, but the German side of the climb (we're crossing the border one last time) also features two 30% steep ramps, this climb is rather unknown because it's closed to private motorized veicles (only public busses), but among the local cyclists it's known for it's ungodly steep ramps.
HirschbichlS.gif

After 7.5km of false flat downhill we have the next climb, Hochschwarzeck, 5.2km az 7.1% with a few sections at 10%, a decent cat. 2 climb. The following descent is the side of the climb that was used as an ascent on the previous day, that means a really steep 2nd part of the descent that could cause some problems.
After that the riders will cross the finish line in Bischofswiesen for the first time, then we have km of false flat.
After that we have the final climb of the day up to Loipl, overall it's 3.3km at 6.2%, but the 2nd part of the climb is mainly false flat, the first km of the climb is 15% steep with ramps up to 21%, a real legbreaker that will do some damage after a hard stage that's filled with steep ramps.
The following descent is short and steep, it's the steep 2nd part of the Hochschwarzeck descent, and will bring the riders down to Bischofswiesen for the 2nd time.
The stage ends in Bischofswiesen, a municipality in the district of Berchtesgadener Land
We could get a pretty awesome final stage, with a HC climb at the start we'll have a strong breakaway and a hard fight at the start. Many of the climbs feature really steep ramps that could wear the riders down and we could already have a really small gc group on top of the Hirschbichl Pass.
Bischofswiesen:
bischofswiesen-im-herbst-thcontentgalleryresponsive.jpg
 
Inspired by today's stage I made a quick plan on circuit where Côte de la Croix Neuve would be. So apart from Mende, the town on the other side of the airport, Brenoux, is part of the route. Not completely sure how good the route on the second downhill would be, it might be too narrow. Mainly I looked this place as WC venue - it's strange to think that France hasn't had one since 2000.

While the circuit itself is like that, I would plan the finish as in today's stage, so different route would be taken on the final lap.

Map
ri850l.png

Profile
29449ig.png
 
Ok, i have only 6 stages to write (one of them will definitely take some time off of me). Over a month ago you had a short synopsis of what became a demo version of the race i'll be posting. I'm thinking of starting it tomorrow, but i'm not sure about LS as he's quite slow with his 100000's Vuelta and it's just after the Tour ended so i guess there are some people, who have some races to share with. If it wouldn't bother you i could start my 2nd Tour de France like day after tomorrow but if it would or there's a barrage of races to come then let me know.

I've modified my Tour to have 3 mountain blocks. That was what i wanted to go with. That premise kinda forced me to be very loose with realism this time and you'll see some more obscure places. Some of them i've showed (without any detail though) in the sort of demo version, but there are some that are brand new. I've tried to pack as many fresh or slightly less popular ideas as i could but some of the stages are kinda repetitious. There will be also one stage that's my answer to whatever the 1st stage of the 2019 edition is.
 
Yes, I've been very slow on this Vuelta at this point - I have to admit that during the Tour my enthusiasm for three-week racing was rather waning and I wasn't feeling especially motivated to go through that type of racing and post at any real depth safe in the knowledge that the post would likely go awol amidst an avalanche of Tour-related posts. I do need to get on with it, though, as there's something of a backlog of ideas building up.

Stage 9: Cangas de Onis - Oviedo, 218km

mpUlOH8.jpg


2yVgItt.png


GPM:
Alto de las Peñas del Viento (cat.1) 6,9km @ 9,1%
Alto de Mallecina (cat.3) 4,1km @ 5,8%
Alto de La Cabruñana (cat.3) 5,4km @ 6,0%
Alto de La Degollada (cat.2) 4,1km @ 10,7%
Alto del Violeo (cat.3) 3,6km @ 8,4%

The second Sunday sees another difficult long stage winding through the northern part of Asturias, not heading into the region's famous mountains but still providing more than enough challenge to the riders along a course which includes five categorised climbs, only one of which is known to the real-life Vuelta a España, though in the fictional world in which my Vueltas exist, another one has been seen previously. The region of Asturias is usually used in the Vuelta for major mountain stages, with big-ticket climbs like Lagos de Covadonga, Anglirú, San Lorenzo, Pajáres and La Cobertoria being legendary names in the race, and Monte Naranco and Mirador del Fito for smaller mountains with big histories. What isn't as commonly held, however, is the kind of medium mountain stage that the coastal and eastern Asturian regions could offer for a really hard-to-control stage that eschews the big name summits but has the potential to be equally challenging. We're used to a fair few of the Valles Mineros climbs of smaller stature - La Manzaneda, Santo Emiliano, Faya de los Lobos for example - but there are tougher ones out there going unused. La Praera is coming up in the 2018 race over a stage that uses some smaller climbs but - again - Asturias is rather like a scaled-up Basque Country; there are climbs all over the place that can be chained together, inconsistent and frustrating for the riders and even backing into the biggest cities (see the classic San Martín de Huerces climb outside Gijón that was used in the 2017 Vuelta stage won by Thomas de Gendt, which was also the same climb used for the ludicrous 2008 LA-MSS exhibition), which is good because obviously it maximises the chance of something interesting happening.

Before that, however, we have the small matter of the opening half of the stage. We begin in a city well-known to the Vuelta; Cangas de Onis has hosted the Vuelta on a large number of occasions. Much like Bourg d'Oisans in the Tour, this is primarily to do with its position at the base of one of the race's most famous - if not THE most famous - ascents, Lagos de Covadonga. But that's not all, however, as Cangas de Onis was a well-established Vuelta stop-off long before the iconic lakes had even been discovered by the race, first appearing in the race in 1974 in an iconic stage which featured a dramatic battle between local hero José Manuel Fuente and the Bic duo of Luís Ocaña and Joaquim Agostinho, which featured the Portuguese taking the victory but not by enough to wrest the jersey from El Tarangu; the stage also featured a conciliatory beginning after Fuente admonished his own partisan fans for their disrespectful treatment of Ocaña the day before. They were different times. Agostinho fared better two years later, taking the leadership of the race off of Dietrich Thurau in Cangas in a stage won by Vicente López Carril, and then Enrique Cima won there in 1978 before the present role of the city was established - as a stage start the day after Lagos de Covadonga, a role it fulfilled in every year from 1983 to 1997 save for 1988, 1990 and 1995 when Los Lagos were not part of proceedings. It has only deviated from this template once since, in 2003 when Luís Pérez Rodríguez and Carlos Sastre held off the rest of the bunch on a short stage over Mirador del Fito, reminiscent of the old days; and it has not been seen since 2007 as tourist spots have been preferred by the Gobierno de Asturias as stage starts in recent years.

That's not to say of course that Cangas de Onis does not have tourist credentials of its own; it is the municipality that owns much of the Picos de Europa natural park, and the historic cave and sanctuary at Covadonga that of course have such impact on Spanish history, as the site of the first significant victory of the reconquista. It was also the capital of the Kingdom of Asturias for a period following this victory, but nowadays its main function is as the principal gateway for pilgrims to the Covadonga sanctuary and outdoor pursuit tourism in the Picos de Europa, including many legendary hikes and of course cyclotourists keen to test their mettle against the Vuelta's most iconic climb.

aire4.jpeg


I could have put about 15 climbs in this stage but I thought I'd try to keep it realistic, so therefore for the most part the opening part of the stage travels through the open valleys of the northern part of the province, through towns like Infiesto, Nava and of course Pola de Siero, the hometown of the legendary king of the mountains, José Manuel Fuente, who remains one of the region's favourite sporting sons to this day, and who I have eulogized at length in a previous design, so needn't be detained by again - I'm sure at this point my fandom for Tarangu need not be elaborated upon.

Between Pola de Siero and the next stop-off point, the major port city of Gijón, which is actually larger than the provincial capital a little further inland, is a small uncategorised climb called the Alto de Muncó. It's justifiably not given points but is worth mentioning because it is the key difficulty of the "Circuito Chechu Rubiera", used frequently in the latter days of the Subida al Naranco one-day race and named, of course, after the Gijón native and loyal Armstrong helper José Luís "Chechu" Rubiera, for whom that race was his biggest individual triumph despite four Grand Tour top 10s - two each at the Giro and Vuelta - and two victories as part of the US Postal Service TTT unit.

03_rubiera_a.jpg

Chechu with some guy who only managed one GT top 10 in his career

After we descend to the coast at Gijón, more flattish terrain takes us to the first intermediate sprint in Aviles. It lives on in worldwide memory mainly as the result of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, a nobleman who established the oldest permanent European settlement in North America which remains inhabited to the present day, St. Augustine in Florida. It also for many years hosted the only sprint stages in the Vuelta a Asturias, and these were often semitappes preceding the ITT in Piedras Blancas in the Castrillón municipality, which we skirt around as we pass through San Juan de Nieva, the terminus of the local railway and an important industrial stop-off, and Salinas, with its extensive beaches. After this we turn back inland to some bumpy terrain with uncategorized climbs, so as not to disrupt traffic to the Aeropuerto de Asturias too much, seeing as we will be into the season in which it has international flights coming in.

These leg-breaking short ascents will give way after a short while, however, to real climbing, and the first climb of the day is also the toughest - the only cat.1 climb of the day, cresting just over 80km from the finish, is the Alto de las Peñas del Viento, which rises almost from sea level to over 700m in 7km of severe climbing which gets progressively tougher, culminating in 2km at almost 11%, and a maximum of 17%.

PenasdelViento.gif


I've used this climb once before, in this stage of an earlier Vuelta, from Llanes to Tineo - which also features the lengthy eulogy to Tarangu that I mention earlier. My words on the climb then were as follows:

The first climb of the day is a comparatively short but steep one (it's actually got a bit of ramping before the classified section, overall you could call it about 10,6km @ 6,5%, but the main body of the climb is the one in this profile. As you can see, it's 3km of far from inconsiderable climbing then topped off with 4km at 10% and a maximum of 17%, so this should be enough of a test to put some of those who are struggling out the back, especially as into and out of Soto del Barco we have some uncategorized ascending.

PenasdelViento01.jpg


Then, because I was headed to Bustellán, I took a different descent, so the ensuing climb to the Alto de Mallecina was not on the agenda. This is a difficult one to classify as I've had to manually route it, with no detailed profile of the climb from this side, but it's not an especially steep one, with only an early few hundred metres at around 8% to uplift its difficulty levels. 14km of mostly gradual descending follows, before we take on the one climb of the day which is genuinely already known to the Vuelta, the fairly unthreatening Alto de La Cabruñana.

perfil.JPG


This well-trodden climb is a regular early-stage leg-tester in recent Vuelta mountain stages, such as 2012 to Cuitu Negru, 2010 to Cotobello, 2013 to Anglirú and 2015 to Ermita de Alba. So you get the drift - the péloton knows it well, and will descend into the second intermediate sprint in Grado with most of those that survived near enough to rejoin the group after Peñas del Viento intact. But then, things will change. Things get narrow, and things get nasty.

ruta-bufaran-degollada-cotera_0306.jpg


Cresting with 35km remaining, the Alto de La Degollada is a shockingly unused ascent which has only seen racing once before - in the 2015 Vuelta a Asturias, where it featured 50km from the end of a stage into Oviedo not altogether unlike this one. That was one of the 'doldrums' years for the Vuelta a Asturias, with a group of six contesting the win, four of whom rode for Movistar (eventual stage winner Jesús Herrada, Ion Izagirre, Rubén Fernández and Igor Antón) and two for Caja Rural (Amets Txurruka and Omar Fraile). A further group of seven came in around 30 seconds back but everybody else was detached on La Degollada and dropped two minutes; with the full scale of a Grand Tour péloton I don't anticipate everything breaking up quite to that extent but nevertheless, this is very much a potentially decisive climb as it can get rid of all but the most elite domestiques, seeing as it's just over 4km averaging almost 11%. The full route to the Area Recreativa is 5,1km @ 8,6% as you can see from the 39x28altimetrias profile below, however with the actual peak of the road a full kilometre before this, you can file this one alongside the likes of Cumbre del Sol and Xorret del Catí.

La%20Degollada.gif


Except, of course, that it's no mountain-top finish, nor is it only a short descent away. I'm thinking we will see teams with multiple cards to play risk one of their weaker cards here to make others chase, to set up a grandstand finale on the final climb, or alternatively if somebody dares make the pace really high like we saw from Roglič on Montée Laurent Jalabert, we could see a few small groups lacking in domestiques spread a few seconds apart down the road, making an interesting tactical battle on the rolling terrain around Santa Cruz de Llanera.

And then, with 12km remaining, the road turns uphill again, and it turns hard uphill too.

carapaz-lleva-1.jpg


Reintroduced after a layoff to the Vuelta a Asturias in 2011, when it led into the final summit finish at Monte Naranco and Javier Moreno successfully defended from defending champion Constantino Zaballa despite the latter's stage win, it's a bit of a nasty wall, as these videos show. The first 2km average 12% and include a maximum of 23%, so with this cresting just 8,3km from the line, there is the potential for some real damage to be done on the run-in.

el-violeo-n.gif


The climb retained its position as the lead-in to Monte Naranco (I have yet to explore that option in a Vuelta on the boards) in 2012, when Beñat Intxausti took the GC win despite losing the sprint at the top of the mountain to Rémy di Gregorio, and in 2013 when Javi Moreno righted the wrong of two years earlier and won the sprint ahead of Mikel Landa and André Cardoso, while the presence in the group of Amets Txurruka - who consolidated his unexpected GC win a day after his maiden professional victory, a moment of great celebration for all - and Arkaitz Durán ensured that I would be positively-disposed towards the stage.

Since then, however, the Violeo-Naranco combo has fallen into disuse, and instead stages have finished in Oviedo after the climb of El Violeo; here you can see the run-in into Oviedo (we have a further kilometre around the city to achieve a safe finish for the larger and deeper péloton of the Vuelta a España) which has been common in the last five years. There was the 2015 edition that was mentioned above, also including La Degollada, after the 2014 absence of the Vuelta a Asturias due to funding cuts, then in 2016 the Circuito Chechu Rubiera was brought back in a short stage finishing on El Violeo, with a three man breakaway of Dani Moreno and the Caja Rural duo of Sérgio Pardilla and eventual GC winner Hugh Carthy, with another group of 6 at +18" and the bunch at +41". The last two years have seen an identical, short stage with El Violeo being the only serious obstacle - nevertheless the variable levels of the Vuelta a Asturias péloton and the difficulty of the ramps on this one have meant selectivity has been achieved - in 2017 Nairo Quintana, who won on El Acebo, tried and failed to wrest the leadership from a thermonuclear Raúl Alarcón, who then attacked and won solo a few seconds ahead of Óscar Sevilla and João Benta, the less-than-squeaky-clean duo dropping Mikel Bizkarra and Quintana, and then the bunch coming in at +40", whereas in 2018 Ricardo Mestre and Aleksandr Evtushenko came in 35 seconds ahead of a group of 14 including the race leader, Richard Carapaz, with the rest of the big names a further 35 seconds behind them.

That ought to give us some indication of the expectation of time gaps here if a sizable group arrives at the bottome of El Violeo together; the best ought to be able to wrestle around 30 to 40 seconds out of those that aren't feeling so good - while the difference between best and worst rider in the bunch will be much less at the Vuelta a España than in the regional tour, the earlier part of the stage has also been significantly beefed up, and there's also the issue of almost doubling the length of the stage also. There is also a short stretch at around 1,9km from the line where we take a pretty unnecessary detour that adds around 300m and two corners to the run-in. This has the benefit of making it easier for a rider to get out-of-sight-out-of-mind, but is also because of the name of the road we turn onto - Calle Samuel Sánchez.

Sanchez_Samuel_statue11.jpg


The most iconic non-Basque ever to ride for the orange warriors of Euskaltel, Samuel Sánchez was an enduring figure of Spanish cycling through the 2000s and 2010s, hailing from Oviedo but extremely loyal to the Basque team who he had come through the youth ranks with. He managed 9 GT top 10s - 6 at the Vuelta and 3 at the Tour - with a highest finish of 2nd, in the 2009 Vuelta, and following the disqualification of Alberto Contador, the same rank at the 2010 Tour. His biggest stage race win was the de facto home race (i.e. his team's home race, which outranks his) in 2012, and while he managed a couple of podiums at Lombardia he never won a monument - however he did win the 2008 Olympic Road Race, which led to his veneration by the city, when they renamed the Calle Teniente Coronel Teijeiro (named after Jesús Teijeiro, who broke the Civil War siege of the city, not to be confused with Teniente Coronel Antonio Tejero, who led a failed coup in 1981) in honour of the cyclist, and erected a statue in his honour as part of the city's ongoing rejuvenation project which also saw another native of the city, and a friend of Samu's, double Formula 1 World Champion Fernando Alonso, similarly honoured. In Samu's case, however, that honour has been dampened somewhat by his late-career positive test for HGH, the now 39-year-old Sánchez perhaps trying a little too hard to cheat father time at this point.

Aside from this, however, we finish by circumnavigating the Campo de San Francisco and finishing on the wide open boulevard of Calle Uria. This stage should be a fairly selective one in the wake of the MTF on Jito d'Escarandí yesterday, and hopefully if La Degollada can't break things up, El Violeo can. Ideally, both can, as this could be a surprisingly decisive stage if raced with sufficient aggression.

erasmus-experience-oviedo-spain-ayman-44bdd9537f0814e824701b2a254360a2.jpg
 
Stage 10: Gijón - León, 168km

5dhNT2n.jpg


GBQNIlR.png


GPM:
Alto de San Martín de Huerces (cat.3) 3,3km @ 9,0%
Alto de La Cruz (cat.3) 4,4km @ 6,6%
Alto de El Carbayu (cat.2) 4,7km @ 8,0%
Puerto de Pajáres (cat.1) 13,1km @ 6,6%

Stage 10 is the final stage before the first rest day, and as a result it's a veritable swarm of possibilities. What outcome is most likely? We could have anything from a sprint of a reduced péloton all the way through to some relatively unexpectedly significant GC action - but the most likely outcome is that the breakaway takes this stage. The second intermediate stage connecting well-versed cities in the Vuelta's lore in a row, this one is nevertheless somewhat different to the last, significantly front-loaded rather than backloaded, with an intriguing design that harks back to the race's past but does not make it clear who would be favoured in a modern setting.

gij%C3%B3n-general-peque-1.jpg


Partially retracing our steps from yesterday, seeing as the stage is moving from Asturias up onto the high plateaus of Castilla y León, we begin at the northern coast, in the largest city of the province, Gijón. At a shade under 300.000 inhabitants, it has more than enough resources to handle the trappings of the race, and once served as the capital of the Muslim territories on the coast around the Sierra Cantabrica. It is perhaps known, despite a strong sporting heritage, best today by sports fans for the Shame of Gijón, a match between West Germany and Austria during the 1982 World Cup where, shortly after kick-off, the Germans scored a goal putting them 1-0 up and then both countries, recognising that they would progress if the situation remained the same, with the Algerians, who had shocked the West Germans with a defeat in the opening match, due to be eliminated having already played their final game, resulting in both teams essentially playing a completely passive game where neither team attempted to score and both teams avoided any strenuous running or challenges that risked injury, leading to an absolutely execrable spectacle.

Gijón has hosted the Vuelta more often than I care to mention - debuting as a stage town all the way back in 1936, in the second Vuelta, when Mariano Cañardo, one of Spanish cycling's earliest heroes, was triumphant, before Rafael Ramos won the following stage to Ribadeo, which started in Gijón as there were no transfers in those days. Délio Rodríguez then took 5 straight wins in the city, a feat made even more impressive by the fact the Vuelta was not yet established as an annual event and so there were sporadic pauses in its existence at that stage. Other winners in Gijón include his younger brother Emilio, Jacques Anquetil, Rudi Altig, José Pérez-Francés, Bernard Hinault, Eddy Planckaert, before a layoff when the race started using its visits to Asturias exclusively to pad out its tradition of mountaintop finishes. After a brief renaissance in the early 2000s, it has now settled into a role of only being used as a starting point for mountain stages, save for the aforementioned 2017 stage which was won by Thomas de Gendt from the breakaway.

Here we use that classic of Gijón cycling, the Alto de San Martín de Huerces, which was the final decisive climb of that stage, as an early obstacle to ensure a strong breakaway. It's almost straight off the bat, but as a result I've downgraded it from its usual cat.2 in stages finishing in Avilés or Gijón to a more appropriate cat.3 - averaging 9% it's a tough cat.3 climb for sure, but it's also almost certain not to see any meaningful action, though the chance to pick up some GPM points without having to go in the break may be tempting for some contenders in the competition.

After this we descend into Pola de Siero, which I mentioned yesterday, and retrace our steps from stage 9 in reverse briefly before turning right, to head southward once more, and into the lower Asturian mountain ridge that leads into the Valle del Nalón. The route we choose to go into that valley is the Alto de La Cruz, a small intermediate climb which has only been used once in the Vuelta a España - in this stage from 1976 won by Vicente López Carril, as mentioned in yesterday's stage allowing Joaquim Agostinho to take the leader's jersey. Weirdly it was given cat.1 status back then, but really it's not much more than a cat.3 once all the false flat is taken out of consideration, and then we can descend into Langreo (Llangreu in Asturianu), part of the scenic mining town conglomeration that lines the valley, along with El Entrego and San Martín del Rey Aurelio.

251537.jpg


The traditional Vuelta route across to the central mountains of Asturias from here would be the Alto de Santo Emiliano, which has been seen 16 times in the race and at 5,4km @ 5,6% is a cat.3 climb along the same lines as yesterday's ascent of La Cabruñana. However, there are a lot of undiscovered side roads and climbs in this region that could make for some monstrous medium mountain stages of constant uncontrollability. Here we only dip our toes in, but we do ascend over the Alto de El Carbayu, putting a little more flat between the end of the descent from La Cruz and the start of the climb than if we simply traversed Langreo to go to Santo Emiliano, but significantly upping the difficulty of the climb with some major inconsistency and some tougher gradients.

elcarbayu.gif


From here we descend into Mieres via Santo Emiliano, since that climb crests just a little below the summit of El Carbayu, so the detour has little impact on stage length or climb connectivity. From Mieres we head along the valley floor to Pola de Lena, which we have often talked about how it should be to the Vuelta what Cortina d'Ampezzo is to the Giro in the Dolomites, or Briançon in the French Alps - a real hub given its proximity to so many great climbs - Pajáres, Cuitu Negru, Cobertoria, Cordal, Cuchu Puercu, La Cubilla, Cotobello, Carabanzo... the city is also the home of the first intermediate sprint, which honours one of the greatest moments in cycling's recent past, the first stage of the 2013 Vuelta a Asturias, best known for being the first career win of Amets Txurruka, after his principle tactic of "attack until one of them sticks" finally paid off after his 5483th career attacking move. For some of us who'd been following the Little Engine That Couldn't Quite for several years, it was a moment we thought would never come. Few wins have been as popular since.

120366-600-338.jpg


What Pola de Lena also does, however, is set us up towards the biggest climb of the day, cresting with 67km remaining in the day, an absolute Vuelta icon which has been one of its key note climbs since day one, the Puerto de Pajáres.

IMG_20161019_133624941.jpg


As it served as the main route from Asturias up onto the meseta and vice versa for many years, the Puerto de Pajáres is wider than most climbs of comparable size, but it's still a pretty significant challenge. It was rebuilt in the late 1960s, with some elevated sections to get rid of some of the narrowest and steepest parts, while it was then widened further with the development of the Valgrande-Pajáres / Brañillín ski stations as the skiing industry took off in Spain in the 1970s. This ski station led to the closure and abandonment of the refuge and subsequent parador at the summit, however before that it did host a stage finish in an ITT in the Vuelta in 1965, a significant factor in Raymond Poulidor's attempt to defend his crown in the race, as he won the stage in convincing fashion only to later lose the race to Rolf Wolfshohl. Until the late 1980s when Valgrande and Brañillín started hosting stages, however, we were mostly treated to stages with profiles like mine here - Pajáres would stand as the toughest climb of the day but then the stage wouldn't finish until León so climbers would need to hold on over much easier and flatter terrain for a long time.

Pajáres' history in the Vuelta goes back to 1945, but there's really two significant stages that give it its legacy more than any others - one old, one new.

1957 was when the first classic stage took place. Or rather, didn't. It was the height of the greatest rivalry Spanish cycling has ever seen - Jesús Loroño vs. Federico Bahamontes. Entire families would fall apart over allegiances, and the rival Loroñistas and Bahamontistas are truly the nearest thing Spain ever had to Coppi/Bartali wars. The Vuelta was also running national teams at that point, so the eternal fratricidal battles between the Spanish team were a sight to behold, with the mercurial, egotistical and unbelievably gifted climber Bahamontes meshing awfully with the temperamental, gutsy Basque climber Loroño. Regional identities played into it but only in part; there was also a deep-seated personal animosity between the two. Loroño had taken over as team leader in the previous year's race after Bahamontes faltered, only to fall short of beating Angelo Conterno for the race. In 1957 he was back to take what he felt was rightfully his; Bahamontes was, however, more alert in the early stage to Mieres and took the race lead; Loroño led on the road but was deserted by his teammates, to his chagrin. The Puerto de Pajáres appeared on stage 4, with Loroño already 13 minutes down. But he wasn't going to let anything get in his way. He was a tough Basque used to bad weather, so the forecast for awful weather was ideal for him, and not for the sun-loving Bahamontes. Heavy snow fell during the stage, and Loroño's breakaway companions fell away one by one. The stage was annulled due to the impassibility of the pass, but Jesús Loroño didn't give a flying one about that - he was riding on pure anger and adrenaline, and ignored the warnings to stop, ignored the instructions that the race was in fact over, and kept turning the pedals over in silent insistence that if nobody else could, he would reach the summit, until he was physically wrestled from his bike to be sent back to Mieres so that the rest of the bunch, huddled together in the train station, could be sent to León, where they only arrived at midnight.

spanje2.jpg


While nowadays we would consider Loroño's exploits perhaps to be a waste of energy, what they did show was how determined the Basque was, and with the help of veteran Bernardo Ruíz, riding in a lower ranked team having not been picked for the national team, ostensibly as he and Bahamontes did not get on, thanks to his often having been charged with being responsible for ensuring Federico was well-placed in the bunch, something the whimsical climber was an enormous obstacle to thanks to his tendency to drift back continually, and was also extremely ungrateful for; Ruíz therefore worked with Loroño in a surprise breakaway to Tortosa, with team cars in the way of Bahamontes and teammates obstructing the Toledano, who went on the offensive that night, aggressively rebuking Loroño, who eventually reacted, leading to Bahamontes spending the rest of the race cowering, having meals sent up to his room in fear that the usually passive Basque was going to fight him. The team was split down the middle between the two factions, and they were even threatened with exclusion from the race if they could not stop from coming to blows - in the end, however, Luís Puig manufactured an armistice between the two, at least publically, until the end of the race (after which they were at one another's throat again) and Loroño took the GC victory.

The second legendary stage is, of course, the 2005 exhibition by Liberty Seguros, when Roberto Heras took by the scruff of the neck a Vuelta that looked lost; it needed something spectacular for him to wrest the jersey off of Denis Menchov, and he managed it - an almighty piece of work by the team sticking two riders in the break, monitoring further attacks and then seeing Heras distance Menchov, whose Rabobank team were lacking in support numbers, at the top of La Colladiella, before unleashing one of the most terrifying descents of all time - many who were there testify they thought Heras would win the Vuelta or, literally, die trying - and meeting his Liberty Seguros domestiques in the valley, waiting by their bikes to pull him up to the front. Serrano and Vicioso did their work in the valley before we arrived on the slopes of the Puerto de Pajáres, where Beloki and finally Scarponi did their work to tow their leader along before Heras hit out for home himself, putting five minutes into Menchov and turning the race upside down - and indeed the sport, as shortly after this Heras tested positive, leading to Menchov being awarded the race (which has subsequently been restored to Heras) - it is alleged that Roberto talked big-time, partially leading to Operación Puerto and also part of the reason why he remains persona non grata in the sport to this day. But for one brief, spectacular moment, he was the architect of genius.

1126423314_850215_0000000000_sumario_normal.jpg


Obviously we can't be expecting such action today; there's still over half the race to go, there's 67km from the sunmit to the finish line and Roberto Heras isn't in the péloton. However, that's not to say that the climb can't be decisive. This will be what tells us how this stage will play out. Will any sprinters survive if the péloton goes at a slow enough rate given it's the last day before the rest day? Will any teams drill it on the climb in the hope that some space can be obtained to prevent others having domestiques in the run-in? Will the breakaway splinter in the face of a 15km+ 6% climb with maximum gradients of 17%, or will the distance to the finish mean that they prefer to keep legs available for use on the plateau?

0b6bb09ac79dab3ba6d75e2a0c8f311ao.jpg


Obviously with 67km to go, and not really any proper descent, the fact we're headed out of the Cordillera Cantábrica now means that the flat stage riders ought to come back to the fore. But if they've suffered on the climb and then the wind blows on the meseta - which it often can - then it could get very interesting in these closing stages as there will be over an hour from the summit to the line. Echelon racing with very few rouleurs left in the bunch could get very exciting - they could also potentially reconnect with the group from behind on the basis that rouleurs experienced in the echelons could potentially gain just as much on a group of skinny grimpeurs on the flat in strong winds as they lose to self-same skinny grimipeurs on the mountain.

Unlike those old-fashioned stages into León after Padrún and Pajáres however, I have included one last little sting in the tail - nine and a half kilometres from the line comes the Muro de Carbajal; I haven't categorized it, just because I'm sinister like that, but this could potentially open up some gaps especially if, like the uncategorized ascent of Garagaltza in the 2012 Vuelta al País Vasco, certain teams haven't read the roadbook enough to expect it. It amounts to, according to PRC, 1,3km at 7,7%, with a maximum gradient of 13%. This is certainly enough for a few strong puncheurs to consider it a good day for them, so this could be a good day for puncheurs who can climb a bit to get into the breakaway - a Tim Wellens, a Thomas de Gendt or a Julien Alaphilippe could consider this a good day for them - they can get over those early climbs and then hope to out-punch their rivals on the Muro de Carbajal before, a bit like a toned down version of yesterday, a gradual downhill rolling stretch of around 8km into León, which features a couple of technical corners and roundabouts between 2km and 1km to go, but only the one roundabout to deal with in the final kilometre, and given that this should be a heavily reduced péloton anyway, I don't think that is too likely to cause any problems.

784764_1.jpg
 
Stage 11: Salamanca - Salamanca, 47,2km (CRI)

HVt93uO.jpg


1uUw3Xj.png


Coming out of the first rest day, we have a transfer south through the meseta to arrive at Salamanca for the big CRI test of the race. This is the only long flat chrono in the race, and so it will be key to the GC standings as well as the best chance for Worlds tuneup men to lay a marker down before the competition for the rainbow jersey post-Vuelta. And it's also perhaps slightly unexpected from me, seeing as it's kind of a nod to somebody that you wouldn't ordinarily expect to see me honouring.

rom11st4_MARTIN.jpg


Oh, come on, you knew that wasn't what I meant.

Red%20jersey%20Froome%20works%20for%20Bradley%20Wiggins.jpg


That's more like it.

Yes - it must be noted that this section of Spain, the western edge of the Spanish meseta central, to the west of those central plateau cities like Valladolid and Palencia, is a regular stop-off in Vuelta designs, and the cities that draw a line from León all the way down to the Sistema Central at Bejár are all places that I have used regularly. La Bañeza, Astorga, Benavente, Zamora, Salamanca, Guijuelo, Bejár, all of them are well-known spots to traceurs, either for transitional flat stages or as routes into either the Sistema Central in the south, the Macizo Galaico around Ponferrada and Bembibre, and the Cordillera Cantábrica in Asturias. I regularly have flat stages heading either out of or into a mountain block in Asturias or the Macizo Galaico here, but this time the race schedule demands a test of man vs. clock in a battle for supremacy, so seeing as we have the rest day preceding this the relatively lengthy transfer does not hold as much of an issue as it otherwise might (this is also the reason for the delayed rest day until after stage 10 rather than after stage 9 as it might normally be expected to be.

The 2011 Vuelta was travelling in the opposite direction, going northward from a mountaintop finish on La Covatilla, and instead of the first day after the rest day, the chrono was the last day before it. Nevertheless, they took on this exact route that day. Here is what I said, before that stage, in the stage thread, about the man who pulled on the red jersey after it.

If Sky have any sense whatsoever, Froome will be nowhere near the top 10 tomorrow and will be at least 5 or 6 minutes down on the winner. They need him conserving all the energy he can so that he can do that job for Wiggins on La Manzaneda, Lagos de Somiedo and Anglirú too.

Cute, Libertine, cute. Shows what YOU know.

In fairness, at that point, Chris Froome had only just pulled out the first really noticeably good racing day he'd had since joining Sky nearly two years earlier, although he'd had flashes that showed the interesting potential stagehunter he had been at Barloworld may have been coming back, at Leysin in Romandie (finishing 8th) and Crans Montana in the Tour de Suisse (attacking on the final climb, but being unable to make it stick). But still, a damning indictment of the impact he had had on my memory, considering the only performance people pointed to to show his TT prowess was three years earlier at that point. Anyway: that was the day after the day before, and over the course of those two days, a destroyer was born. Clearly Sky were as taken aback by it as the rest of us, otherwise they wouldn't have allowed that photo above to be taken - where Froome, clad in the race leader's jersey, was towing Wiggins along up the climb to the La Manzaneda ski station, eventually losing time due to his efforts, which proved crucial in the race overall - losing 27 seconds to his teammate, and, more crucially, Juan José Cobo. Of course, the rest is history, and that completely unexpected, bizarre overperformance by a fairly obscure middling climbing helper who a month earlier was domestiquing for Morris Possoni turned into the norm and became the standard that we have had to get used to for the past seven years. Back then, it was bizarre enough. Though in fairness - the Kenyan-born Briton didn't actually win the time trial, his stick insect figure still had a deficit in power to Tony Martin's tank-like frame, but this TT performance underpinned the British team's first time controlling a Grand Tour with their still-in-development train technique; the uncertainty about backing the overachieving surprise performer over a tried-and-trusted in-house operative in Wiggins cost them the race, a mistake they would not repeat.

depositphotos_27142215-stock-photo-panorama-of-salamanca-spain.jpg


The TT for the most part circles south of the city on a rolling course with no serious climbs or descents, mostly slightly uphill in the first half and slightly downhill in the second, with a scenic final couple of kilometres in the UNESCO World Heritage Site-inscribed old city. It is a major seat of learning in Spain, with its university being the oldest in the country and around a sixth of all overseas students learning Spanish in Spain will do so in Salamanca. Less celebratedly, it was also used as a de facto capital by the Nationalists during the Civil War, and it was in the city that the Carlist party and the Falangists merged to create FET-JONS (Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista), the single-party autocracy that would rule Spain from the end of the Civil War until Franco's death.

As one of the largest cities in this part of the country (it is the second largest, after Valladolid, in Castilla y León), it served as a frequent stop-off for the Vuelta when travelling along this side of the country. The Belgian, Joseph Huts, was the first to win here, pulling on the leader's jersey as the winner of stage 1 of the 1936 edition. The connection to the ruling party made it a popular stop-off point in subsequent attempts to get the Vuelta off the ground, Berrendero winning in 1941 and 1945, and it typically saw action as either the finish of the first or penultimate stages throughout the decade. When El Correo-El Pueblo Vasco were in charge the city was less prominent as there was less reason for the race's Basque-sympathetic organizers to celebrate the Falange; the city is off the menu for 20 years before Ramón "Tarzán" Sáez wins there in 1967. The next time the race arrives, times are very different; Franco is dead, Unipublic are in charge of the Vuelta, and the Basque Country is a no-go area for the race. Guido Bontempi is next to win in Salamanca, then José Luís Laguía in 1983. The following day, when Hinault went out fighting and won the race over Peña Negra and Serranillos, is perhaps the most famous Salamanca stage in Vuelta lore, however. It was also the scene of the first victory by a Soviet rider in a Grand Tour, when Malakov won the sprint on the final day in 1985, Pedro Delgado's only day in yellow. In the 90s it returned to prominence, with Jalabert winning there in 1994, and an ITT in the city won by Abraham Olano a year later (6km shorter than this route). Olano duplicated this feat in 1999 over a longer route (51km), when the city was saturated with the Vuelta, hosting a sprint finish, an ITT and a stage start. In 2000 it was back and in 2001 it was the Grand Depart, with David Millar winning an ITT, while in 2002 it hosted both the Vuelta and the national championships, where Igor González de Galdeano won the chrono (over 49km) and in a shock result, rank outsider Juan Carlos Guillamón of the Jazztel-Costa Almería team beat Olano in a two-up sprint in the road race; since then it's been the Vuelta a Castilla y León only, save for a Cavendish-won sprint stage in 2010 and the 2011 Chrono this is based on, though the nationals did return for their road race in 2012, which was won by Francisco Ventoso, perhaps unsurprisingly given the mostly flat region.

1340563587_924183_1340563948_noticia_normal.jpg
 
Stage 12: Guijuelo - Jarandilla de la Vera, 161km

pWLplUv.jpg


ifjIcjX.png


GPM:
Puerto de La Hontilla (cat.2) 10,4km @ 5,0%
Puerto de Cabezabellosa (cat.2) 10,5km @ 4,9%
Puerto del Rabanillo (cat.2) 9,0km @ 5,0%
Alto del Barrado (cat.2) 5,0km @ 7,3%
Alto de la Guija de Santa Bárbara (cat.3) 4,0km @ 6,3%

After the time trial we have a comparatively short stage which takes us into one of the Vuelta's more neglected regions, the relatively poor western province of Extremadura. Known for baking heat and comparatively low on high-population towns and cities that can host the race, it's typically only seen in the Vuelta for a fly-by passing in recent years. Before we get there, however, we are starting off in the southern part of Salamanca province, in the city of Guijuelo. With around 6.000 inhabitants it's not a huge city by any stretch of the imagination, perhaps best known for its protected Denominación de Origén for the local variety of Jamón. It has hosted the Vuelta only once in recent memory, the 2013 flat stage into Cáceres won by Michael Mørkøv following an almost-but-not-quite successful breakaway from Tony Martin, who went on to win the World Championships TT a few weeks later; he put his skills to great use for one of the most exciting finishes to a sprint stage we've seen in recent years, coming so close to surviving that he still finished 7th in the bunch sprint - being caught mainly because Cancellara wanted to deny his eternal TT rival a confidence boost leading into the World Championships and contributed to the chase even despite his team lacking in a sprinter. Not only did that gambit work for Fäbu but he even made 3rd in the bunch sprint - only for Tony to win the Worlds anyway.

ayuntamiento-guijuelo-27865765.jpg


We head immediately southwards towards the Sistema Central, early on passing over the no puntable Puerto de Vallejera, 4km at 4,6% and mis-labelled on the profile as the neighbouring Alto de La Hoya. This enables us to descend into a well-known Vuelta town, Bejár. Bejár is, of course, the base of one of the more famous recent discovery mountaintop finishes in the Vuelta, the Estación de Esquí La Covatilla, introduced in 2002 when Santi Blanco was the first to the summit, and returning two years later (won by Félix Cardeñas) and two further years later (won by Danilo di Luca) before a layoff until the 2011 Vuelta where a Unipuerto stage - a day before the Salamanca TT previously referenced - was won by Dan Martin ahead of Bauke Mollema, after Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins showed their form by grinding a number of contenders to dust with tempo riding, one of the first times we truly saw the Sky template that has now become the visual norm in the Grand Tour mountains. Crucially, however, Wiggins lost 1 and Froome 4 seconds at the line to Juan José Cobo, given some freedom after his team leader, Denis Menchov, lost time; Cobo also gained four potentially crucial bonus seconds on the line. The climb returns in the 2018 Vuelta; it has also been used once in the Vuelta a Castilla y León, in 2005; its next-door neighbour, the slightly easier Plataforma del Travieso, was introduced to the same race in 2016, with Alejandro Valverde being the first to triumph there, outsprinting Portuguese grimpeur Joni Brandão.

The use of these climbs around Bejár was to a large degree influenced by the area's history of climbers and motivated by the most famous Bejarano cyclist, who was in his heyday at the time - Roberto Heras, who won four Vueltas (officially speaking the 2005 Vuelta has been returned to him, making him the sole owner of the crown for most Vuelta victories; if you don't count the 2005 edition as being won by Heras, then it's an accolade he shares with Tony Rominger and Alberto Contador on three). He himself was following in the footsteps of another great escalador, Laudelino "Lale" Cubino, who won stages of all three GTs and finished on the podium of his home race back in the early 90s. I wrote about them in a previous Vuelta here so no need to re-tread their career paths.

40923813224_bd944a669c_b.jpg


From here, we gradually descend into the fringes of the higher meseta, towards those lead-in climbs for stages in the Bejár area such as El Cerro and Lagunillas. We're headed to an alternative one however - climbing to, but not fully to, the Puerto de La Garganta, at a summit not used in racing at the pro level; the Puerto de La Hontilla.

The main routes into Bejár from the lower plateau in Extremadura are the Puerto de La Garganta and the main highway, the very gradual Puerto de Bejár. As you can see, there's significant altitude difference between them, and there is a small side road which links the summits, via an inconsistent route which has a secondary summit after a steep ascent. This is the Puerto de La Hontilla, a narrow and tricky cat.2 climb which introduces us to the day's ascending.

garganta-por-hondilla.jpg


From here, rather than continue up to the Puerto de La Garganta, when we arrive in the village of La Garganta we instead descend down into Hervás, the scenic castle town that provides our gateway to Extremadura. We then skirt along the feet of the Sistema Central for a while, before the main body of the climbing of the stage can take place.

Realistically, this is probably a stage for the break and if any non-GC rider wants to contest the GPM, this will be an ideal stage to get away because, with the TT having just come up and the stage being too difficult for any sprinters, it's unlikely too many of the GC men will want to contest this especially aggressively; they will have the opportunity therefore of stage wins and mountains points - good Worlds prep if there's a punchy Worlds too - I anticipate a break including the likes of Matej Mohoric, Julien Alaphilippe, Diego Ulissi, Omar Fraile, Jose Gonçalves, Gorka Izagirre and so on here. The climbs are quite sustained so the breakaway need to be relatively climbing-adept even if they're not especially steep, but they're also not the kind of climbs - nor are they close enough to the finish - to interest the GC contenders. Maybe if they're out of contention for the GC the likes of David de la Cruz and Carlos Verona could involve themselves also.

The first of these climbs is the Puerto de Cabezabellosa. Like many climbs around here it's a fairly consistent one, with gradients skirting around 5% throughout. With 70km to go it's a brave rider who hits for home here, before we descend into the Valle del Jerte. PRC did an excellent job of considering the possibilities of the Valle del Jerte here which inspired the finish of this stage, if nothing else (otherwise I would probably have reprised the Monastério de San Jerónimo de Yuste finish I used previously, but the circuit they used in their first recommendation makes for a more interesting and varied consideration); however while they went over the Puerto del Piornal, before multiple laps of the circuit, I did not want multiple laps and not such a hard stage given that I've already had two cat.2 climbs on the day - this is not intended to be a brutal stage but a transitional one.

Instead, I used the two-stepped Alto del Barrado, a secondary summit on the shoulder of Piornal. It could feasibly be a cat.1 climb but instead I broke it up into its relevant parts, separating the Puerto del Rabanillo, a perfectly reasonable climb in its own right at 9km @ 5%, from the steeper and rougher final 5km on a trunk road from the village of Barrado to the summit. The combined total is 16,2km @ 4,5% and you can view the profile here. It crests 42km from home and features the steepest sections of the day after Hontilla, so this is perhaps where the selection that settles the stage from the break will be made, especially with those ramps of 12% that aren't seen elsewhere. Certainly this would be the point at which Carlos Barredo would hit for home back when he was active (and Sean Kelly would then criticise him for it). To the best of my knowledge the Alto del Barrado has never featured in La Vuelta; certainly not from this side. The race doesn't pass this way often and when it does it's seldom for mountain stages. The Puerto del Piornal, Barrado's big brother, has featured in 2004 and 2006, Tornavacas was used in 1990 and 2002, Honduras (Cabezabellosa's big brother) in all of the first three La Covatilla stages, but aside from that these climbs are somewhat virgin territory for the real-life Vuelta. In the fantasy world inhabited by my Vueltas, however, it's less the case; the easy side of Barrado and the opposite side of Cabezabellosa saw action in an early stage of my 6th Vuelta, while the 5th edition, the medium mountain super-odyssey, featured this stage in week 3 which I referenced earlier - using Rabanillo and Barrado as a two-climb combo before the puncheur finish at San Jerónimo del Yuste. TromleTromle also used Cabezabellosa along with Piornal in this stage, while Forever The Best featured Cabezabellosa in a stage to La Covatilla which followed the time honoured chain otherwise (link here) - perhaps it's unsurprising given the infrequence with which the Vuelta utilises this area, and that the Vuelta a Extremadura hasn't run since 2011 (as an amateur race, previous editions were UCI 2.2), when the Argentine Gustavo Ignacio Pérez won for the Azysa Telco'm team that would then go on to destroy the calendar the following year, primarily thanks to Arkaitz Durán. The last UCI-categorized edition, in 2009, was won by José António de Segovia, riding for the legendary Spanish amateur team Supermercados Froiz; his results that year earned him a pro ride with Xacobeo-Galicía, but he returned to his old amateur team for a number of years before seeking refuge in Portugal. Perhaps the highest profile winner of the race in recent times was José Ángel Gómez Marchante, who won with Supermercados Froiz himself in 2003 before turning pro; he went on to decent domestic success, finishing 8th in the Vuelta in 2004 and 5th in 2006, before falling well down the totem pole at Cervélo after being caught up in the Saunier Duval controversies in 2008; he pipped Carlos Barredo, another well-known name, to the victory.

1200px-Barrado1.jpg


The descent from the Alto del Barrado takes us to Jaraíz de la Vera, a pretty town well known for its natural baths that are one of the bigger attractions in this relatively sparsely populated corner of Spain. It's all rolling terrain round here, save for an uncategorized 1km at approx 7% around Cuacos de Yuste. We then arrive at our stage town, Jarandilla de la Vera, before we take on a lap of the circuit proposed by PRC in the link above. Here's the full profile of the circuit:

circuito-jarandilla-guij.png


As you can see, apart from a short ramp of 8,3%, there's no serious climbing to be had here, and therefore the likelihood of the GC men making a big deal of this is limited; they may try but I would expect all of the GC men on the same time here with the descent giving time for it to come back together, and only if there are stage time bonuses on the line would there be much interest from them (they may also be incentivised by seconds at the intermediate sprint on the first passage of the finish line, just 12,5km from home, though I suspect the break will take this). However, if as I anticipate this is a stage settled among escapees, as a day of comparative GC truce, then with teams unlikely to have more than a couple of riders in the break (I foresee 25-30 riders contesting the break here), control will be more difficult and so it could lead to an intriguing battle. A very similar finishing circuit was used in the 2004 Vuelta a Extremadura's final stage; a small group settled the finish, with the stage won by Victor Manuel Gómez, later of Andalucía and Viña Magna, and the GC lead being passed to second-placed finisher Juan Carlos López Marín, the Colombian in the Saunier Duval development team, taking the lead away from Jordi Grau, a highly-touted prospect in the Saíz system; he was a stagiare for Liberty Seguros before being farmed off to the Portuguese team for a few years before leaving the sport at 26. The descent is comparatively narrow but perfectly ridable so this shouldn't present any difficulties for logistics either.

Obviously using a pro-am race to predict what will happen in a Grand Tour is more than a little fraught with difficulty, but given that I anticipate the breakaway to settle this, I wouldn't be surprised to see a group escape and contest the final couple of kilometre run-in after proving the strongest puncheurs in the break. The finish is in front of the Castillo Palacio de los Condes de Oropesa, now converted into a Parador, mandated in the 15th Century and completed during the following one, under Carlos V. It should make for a scenic finish, and, given the relatively sparse population in the area, hopefully attract fans from local cities like Plasencia and Navalmoral de la Mata to lend their support.

entorno_01_19.jpg


jarandilla_de_la-_vera.png
 
Stage 13: Talavera de la Reina - Ciudad Real, 177km

3sfljNC.jpg


r0ZbI5O.png


GPM:
Alto Risco de las Paradas (cat.3) 9,1km @ 4,3%

As we head toward the second weekend, the Friday stage is one which is a nice transitional stage for the péloton and the first stage fully for the sprinters in a whole week (some might be able to make it to the end in León, but the purer ones certainly won't) - since the GC upper echelons are more than likely keen to have a lazy day, so I should have one too, not least because the scale of these two cities on the southern meseta has meant that they have cropped up multiple times in my Vueltas previously and so I have already had plenty to say about them.

In fact, in my 7th Vuelta I had a transitional week one stage which was between Talavera de la Reina and Ciudad Real, just like today. Here's what I had to say about the host town for the start then:

The stage begins in Talavera de la Reina, a historic city fabled for its pottery which was renamed Talavera del Tajo under Franco before its royal name was restored. Its most famous son in the modern péloton is veteran climber David Arroyo, winner of a Vuelta stage and of course the man who nearly stole that Giro. I'll link you to the legendary Mortirolo stage - part 1 is here, from which you can link to the other parts - because let's face it, you can't watch that stage enough. Arroyo's descent of the Mortirolo and subsequent heartbreak on Aprica is one of the most compelling and breathtaking stories the sport has given us in recent years. Anyway, this won't be a stage for him.

Talavera has featured in a few recent Vueltas, typically as a transitional city on the way from the Sierra Nevada to the finishing stages around the Sierra de Madrid in week 3; in both 2007 and 2009 it hosted the finish of a flat stage from Ciudad Real (so the reverse of today's stage). The 2007 stage was in fact almost identical to this one run backwards and was won in the sprint by Daniele Bennati, whereas 2009's was longer and due to a miscalculation Anthony Roux just held off the bunch by a bike length from the charging Greipel in a fantastic finish. Both years saw the city serve as the départ for the following day's stage to Ávila (won by José Luís Pérez and Philip Deignan respectively); in addition, a further sprint stage from Almadén followed in 2011, and was won by Marcel Kittel while the following stage was the exciting and beautifully designed San Lorenzo de El Escorial stage won by Purito. The city also hosted the national road race in 2008, which was won by Alejandro Valverde in a two up sprint against Óscar Sevilla after Caisse d'Épargne did a number on Babyface, sparing us the potential horror that would have been a Rock Racing Spanish National champion's outfit!

This stage is, like those 2007 and 2009 stages, bound to be flat and it would require miscalculation for the sprinters not to come out on top here. There aren't too many obvious landmarks to call out on the way, nor are there real obstacles, although the land isn't truly flat

slide-pet_0.jpg


Now - today's stage is slightly tougher than that one in that in Navahermosa, instead of skirting to the north of the Parque Nacional de Cabañeros, we head directly through it, which entails taking on a categorized climb, something that previous stage included none of - but being in the first half of the stage and with so much time left to go - as well as a weekend to come - it's very unlikely to provide anything of note to be honest; people contesting the GPM are unlikely to fight to be in the break over three measly points for cresting it first, when there's over a week to go and weekend stages that are far more significant for the GPM than this, while it's too far from the finish to provide a platform for attacking from, and too easy to drop any but the absolute dirt worst climbing sprinters in the bunch, and if they're truly that bad at climbing they may well have either climbed off or been eliminated hors delais by now anyway.

Risco%20de%20las%20Paradas%20N%20perfil.jpg


The central part of the stage has touristic opportunities - there will likely be few fans, given that this western part of Castilla-La Mancha is fairly sparsely populated (we're sort of parallel to stage 3 which ran through the same part of the country but around 150-200km to the east, closer to a number of significant towns and cities, but there are few sizable established towns in the race route today) and that has led to some beautifully preserved countryside in the Parque Nacional de Cabañeros, the best-preserved area of Mediterranean forest on the Iberian peninsula, and home to a large number of endangered species - although some of these, such as the Iberian Lynx and the Spanish Imperial Eagle, are struggling themselves thanks to a downturn in the number of rabbits, their primary prey.

12942768xQ.jpg


Anyway, its lush green, verdant fields, irrigated by the water stored in, among others, the reservoir at the Embalse Torre de Abraham, which the riders will pass along at the first intermediate sprint, will provide a welcome respite from the scorched countryside of the Spanish south seeing as, with the lack of major towns and the likelihood of a sprint, it's liable to be one of 'those' stages, with only a couple of riders from Burgos-BH and the like getting the call to go in the break today.

8879.jpg


Luckily, if Carlton Kirby doesn't have enough facts to hand about Aitor González Prieto, Diego Rubio or Fabricio Ferrari, the stage does still offer plenty of esoteric nonsense for him to spout, seeing as the destination today, Ciudad Real, is the town of Spain's most famous fictional inhabitant, Alonso Quixano, the famous hidalgo created by Miguel de Cervantes, who adopts the name Don Quixote de la Mancha and attempts to revive chivalry.

As an aside, one of my very favourite stories is the (very) short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote by the Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges, an epigraph for a fictional French writer who attempts, without reading Don Quixote, to arrive at a word-for-word reconstruction of it, in 17th Century Castilian Spanish; the 'Borges' narrator argues that Cervantes' work was a product of its time, but for a 20th Century Frenchman to arrive at the exact same wording requires a greater depth of thinking, rendering those fragmented sections that Menard successfully reproduced "much richer in allusion" than the original even though they are absolutely identical - it's both a great satire of pretension in review and in literature, and also the attempt of the fictional author to recreate a text is in itself quixotic since of course Cervantes' fictional Quixote set out to revive a dying art, to ultimate futility.

Carlton may be more familiar with Cervantes than Borges, so at least there will be plenty of windmills for him to make 'tilting at windmills' references to before chuckling to himself as the bunch holds the small group of ProConti hopefuls on a tight leash.

Ciudad-Real-deluxe1.jpg


OK, so now I'm blathering... let's face it, whichever 'real' sprinters haven't gone home at the first weekend will be contesting this; given the nature of the Vuelta I'm expecting the best sprinters left to be the likes of Michael Matthews, maybe Nacer Bouhanni. Here's what I said about Ciudad Real in the 8th of my Vueltas, which approached similarly from the west - this is a common transitional stage town.

As we head into the Campo de Calatrava historic region, of which Ciudad Real, today's stage town, is the nominal capital (and of course, the capital of the present-day province of Ciudad Real within Castilla-La Mancha), riders will be able to smell the finish line, which after 6 hours in heat which is likely to be in excess of 30º will be a welcome relief. It's not Qatar hot here but there are temperatures in excess of 40º recorded. The average high in August is 33º and in September 28º so depending on when the Vuelta starts this should give an idea of what to expect - low 30s is a reasonable guess. If there is a flat or rolling World Championships this year, you can guarantee that the leading sprinters will want to make a mark here.

Although Ciudad Real had a real fad for hosting the Vuelta for a while, it is surprisingly not a traditional host given its convenient location, with the race typically preferring to drop into Toledo in its trips through the region, and with the historic Vuelta's time spent south of Madrid being primarily close to the coastal resorts it hasn't had the same history as you might expect for a city of its size within touching distance of Madrid. It did have a spate of Vuelta stages in the 2000s though, hosting three stage starts, two stage finishes and one time trial based entirely around the city:
- a sprint stage in 2005 left the city and was won in Argamasilla de la Sierra by Ale-Jet;
- a late-race transitional stage in 2006 was won by José Luís Arrieta from the break;
- a sprint stage in 2007 left the city and was won by Daniele Bennati in Talavera de la Reina;
- Levi Leipheimer won the 42km test against the clock here in 2008;
- the ensuing stage to Toledo, ahead of the early first rest day, was won on a short repecho by Paolo Bettini;
- in 2009 a clone of the 2007 stage took place in week 3, only Anthony Roux surprised and outfoxed the sprinters, being caught right on the line à la Tony Martin, only being able to hold on from André Greipel by the narrowest of margins.

pl_mayor_ciudad_real_t1300006.jpg_1306973099.jpg


Surprisingly no stages have approached the city from this side, although the stages departing for Talavera de la Reina have gone through the same terrain I'm closing us off in. I have personally used the city as a stage finish before, usually in races transitioning northwards from the south coast in week 2; as a result the same finish outside the Don Quixote Museum is used.

Plaza-Mayor-Ciudad-Real-1.jpg


The sprinters get their fun here. They might stick around a few days, but some of them may well leave the race after this.
 
Stage 14: Puertollano - La Guardia de Jaén (Alto de Allanadas del Santo), 225km

P7OQBeO.jpg


0N2Ac9e.png


GPM:
Puerto de Los Rehoyos (cat.3) 14,8km @ 3,0%
Puerto de La Madrona (cat.2) 7,5km @ 6,2%
Alto de Los Pinos (cat.3) 6,1km @ 4,5%
Alto de Los Villares/Puerto Viejo (cat.2) 10,0km @ 5,6%
Alto de Allanadas del Santo (cat.1) 5,5km @ 9,6%

Another short transfer and we're set for the penultimate weekend of the Vuelta, which will take us down from Castilla-La Mancha into Andalucía. Perhaps now best known as the home of former Real Madrid and Valencia goalkeeper Santiago Cañizares, who was capped for Spain on 46 occasions, and with a bleach blonde mullet that was instantly recognizable, the city's name is a concatenation; one popular joke in the area is Puertollano ni tiene puerto, ni es llano (Puertollano neither has a port (puerto), nor is flat (llano)), however the city's name arose because of its position on the meseta, along the ridges of the Sierra Morena; the city was built at a point where the ridges fall away, creating a gap for easy passage between the Sierra's ridges, which gave the impression of a col (the other meaning of 'puerto' of course) on flat land ('llano'), but as the city has grown from a trading/travelling outpost to a modern city of 50.000 inhabitants, it has outgrown the gap in the mountains and spread onto its ridges giving the lie to both of its constituent named parts.

2017_04_11_No_03-puerto.jpg


Puertollano was a regular stop-off for the Vuelta in the late 2000s, featuring in 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009, with three of those stages finishing in sprints (won by Alessandro Petacchi, Daniele Bennati and André Greipel respectively). The exception was 2007, when a breakaway survived, from which Leonardo Duque took the stage win. That stage rather resembled much of my stage here, but in reverse... I have also featured Puertollano in a similar role in a previous Vuelta, although at that point it was in week 1. That was in my 7th Vuelta, in a difficult hilly stage to Jaén which is, for its first half distance, completely the same as this one, then after that, completely different.

The stage is rolling from the get-go, and only gets tougher. It begins with an uncategorized climb, before we descend at a similarly gradual rate to another of the many reservoirs around the region, the Embalse de Montoro.

Presa-montoro.jpg


From here, we begin climbing, and there's a lot of it to do today as well... luckily for the riders it starts off pretty benignly, as we climb the easier side of the Puerto de los Rehoyos, before descending and then straight afterwards taking on the category 2 Puerto de Madrona, arguably the toughest climb in Ciudad Real province. At this point a fairly strong and sizable break ought to have been established - I know it's early in the race but this isn't the kind of stage a break of 3 Benelux team domestiques and a guy from a local ProConti team goes in; too many people will want to be part of it. Whoever it is that does get into the break now has about 30km to establish their advantage before the scenic and technical descent from the Santuário de Nuestra Señora de la Cabeza, which leads us via a third, relatively benign ascent, to the city from which the sierra takes its name, Andújar.

fe0bf0cd110578e6627a3deed5a58a28o.jpg


Whereas back then we went Jaén-bound straight away, then looping around, today we head to the west of the Sierra de La Pandera, and head for Torredonjimeno and Martos. There is a lot of false flat and rolling terrain in this stage; lots of people will be struggling with this one simply because it's a 225km stage with a lot of ups and downs, many of which are uncategorized - there's not that much respite at all. Torredonjimeno is our next stop, home of the Clásica Ciudad de Torredonjimeno, one of the more prestigious one-day races on the Spanish amateur calendar and certainly the most prestigious southern race of it. António Gómez de la Torre of the Caja Rural amateur setup won this year's edition but other recent victors include Héctor Carretero and António Pedrero, both now with Movistar, and Julen Amezqueta, now with Caja Rural after a couple of years in Italy. Mikel Bizkarra, Mikel Iturria, Jorge Arcas, Richard Carapaz, Juan António López-Cozar and Xavi Cañellas have all podiumed it in the last few years, plus it was one of the bigger wins of Raúl Alarcón's career prior to his 2017 self-reinvention (the mighty bullet of Alicante won back in 2009); featuring the Puerto de Locubín and the Puerto Viejo among its several climbs, it's a tricky race that hones the all-round skills.

web15.jpg


After passing through Martos, there's an uncategorized ascent, as we slightly ape the start of the Ruta del Sol stage to Mancha Real, only instead of climbing to the Puerto Viejo via Fuensanta de Martos, we go by a much steeper and less well-known route, the Alto de Los Villares via Alto de La Yedra. We sort of ought to know about it, though.

pviej_yed_14.gif


The Alto de La Yedra is something comparatively unusual among Spanish climbs - it's a climb that Unipublic actually discovered before the majority of the traceur community. Spain has, as any long-time follower of this thread will be keenly aware, a vibrant traceur community, with PRC and APM - which have much co-operation and overlap - producing the majority thereof. However, while a small handful of contributors knew about it and it had even been featured in Desde la Cuneta back in 2014, there was some interest in getting to the bottom of just what this "Los Villares" climb was that Unipublic had snuck into the original design for the Écija - Sierra de la Pandera stage of the 2017 Vuelta, a cat.1 that shortly preceded La Pandera. Eventually we never really got to find out, since it was excised in the final draft, which instead went over the Puerto de Locubín (typically renamed the Alto Valdepeñas de Jaén by Unipublic owing to its proximity to the town of the same name but also giving false expectation that the steep ramp that we saw in the 2010, 2011 and 2013 Vueltas would feature) and left all of the difficulties to the mountaintop finish. Here, however, La Yedra with its Arrate-like nature serves as a tricky warmup - its 5,8km @ 7,4% overall belie that 4km @ 9,8% in the middle that have much more in common with the likes of Cumbre del Sol than your average cat.2; however, the climbing continues at a gradual pace until the eventual summit at just over 40km from home, so there's no respite; a more realistic comparison point is therefore perhaps Erlaitz, which Juan José Cobo used as the basis of his 2007 Vuelta al País Vasco triumph. The road isn't great, even for a couple of kilometres after joining the Fuensanta de Martos side, but it's all part of the challenge.

051.jpg


From here, then, we descend into Jaén, which hosts the second intermediate sprint, with the hope of incentivizing some secondary contenders to attack on La Yedra. This descent is broken up by the uncategorized Caserío de la Condesa climb, which according to PRC is 2,9km @ 5,5% from this side (no profile), and is 27km from home, so the breakaway could be falling apart here plus you could have secondary moves going on at this stage, with probably the medium-mountain types and those who probably haven't fallen away massively but require a big slice of luck to get back into the GC mix considering making a hit for home - I'm thinking of the likes of Rubén Fernández, Enric Mas, Sérgio Luís Henao, that type of rider.

IMG_5522-e1511943389163.jpg

Meta Volante in Jaén

After the intermediate sprint, things don't ease up as though we aren't doing the punchy climb into La Guardia de Jaén that I included in that previous Jaén stage, getting from Jaén to La Guardia de Jaén is far from straightforward gradient-wise; it's 4,5km @ 4,6% as we take on a finish very similar to that used in the 2018 Ruta del Sol; however, instead of just heading into La Guardia de Jaén and then turning uphill, we're going to up the ante a little, and instead we descend out of the town, via a narrow and technical road, and then climb the Alto de Allanadas del Santo, not in part as is typical of the Ruta del Sol, but in full.

all_gb_15.png


The Alto de Allanadas has featured in the Ruta del Sol three times in the last decade. In 2010, disputes with the organisers meant that, with the exception of the local team, Andalucía-Caja Sur, all of the Spanish teams boycotted the race. They did still get some home riders to cheer, though, as Sérgio Pardilla, then riding on the Italian CarmioOro team (registered in the UK), took the win in a Unipuerto stage ahead of Jürgen van den Broeck and Damiano Cunego.

The climb's return five years later was far more high-octane. Helped by the return of live images, the Vuelta a Andalucía has returned to its place as a prominent pre-season tune-up, and in 2015 it was the site of the year's first battle between those two titans of modern GT racing, the stylish, swashbuckling but tainted Alberto Contador vs. the inelegant, calculating but powerful Chris Froome. Contador had been triumphant on Haza Llana, but Froome would get his revenge in dominant fashion, laying down an early season marker as he put 30 seconds into his rival on the short climb. It returned once more in 2018, when once more it was a Team Sky rider that triumphed, this time Froome's Vuelta right-hand-man Wout Poels, although as you can see from the video time gaps were far less herculean than when his team leader was driving the pain train rather than running from the media to avoid discussion of his then-ongoing AAF. The top 10 were split by under 40 seconds.

Albergues-2.jpg


Perched atop the mountain overseeing La Guardia de Jaén, however, it's worth noting that Allanadas del Santo is not the 3km climb it is shown as in those stages, however. It is in fact 5km long if taken from the full route, starting beneath La Guardia. Indeed, in the 2012 Vuelta a Andalucía, that 2km lead-in climb featured as a puncheur finish in stage 4, with the stage finishing in La Guardia de Jaén, at the edge of town where the Allanadas del Santo climb begins to rise steeply. You can see that part of the climb here, with Daniel Moreno out-punching Alejandro Valverde (fresh from his suspension and not yet up to full speed) and Luís León Sánchez; Don Alejandro would go on to win the overall GC, however, the first of his record 5 titles in the Ruta del Sol. Anyway: so a perfectly reasonable puncheur finish, followed by a Mende-alike. Should make for some half decent time gaps, hey?

fortaleza10.jpg