Race Design Thread

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 10: Manzanillo - Tercer Frente, 160km

GPM:
El Yayal (cat.3) 1,6km @ 6,6%
Alto de Juba (cat.3) 2,1km @ 7,1%
El Yayal (cat.3) 1,6km @ 6,6%

After the rest day, we are back in action with a hilly stage which sees us travel along the northern edges of the Sierra Maestra before heading into its foothills for some climbing - nothing as tough as Alto del Naranjo, of course, but still enough that should hopefully give us some interesting competition. After descending from the mountains we have our stage start in the city of Manzanillo, on the western edge of the irregular protrusion at southeastern Cuba, on the Gulf of Guacanayabo. It was first built in 1784 and got a fort nine years later following being ransacked by the French, with its port being opened for commerce in the early 19th Century, although it remains mainly agricultural in nation, having been a long way behind the already-established Santiago de Cuba for this purpose. However, discovery of zinc and copper led to a mining industry being established in the region, while industrial development has led to fish-canning being a major employer in the city, which at 125.000 has the fourteenth largest population of any city in the country, making it the largest city on the island not to hold the status of a provincial capital.

The city was the birthplace of Bartolomé Maso, who I covered in the previous stage, and also to the trovadore and singer Carlos Puebla, a composer and performer with the group Los Tradicionales before 1959, but his political stance supporting the revolution brought his music - which was already regionally respected and popular - to a wider audience. He toured in 1961 to promote the ideals of the Revolution worldwide, and from 1962 became part of the rotating house ensemble of performers at the Bodeguita del Medio, an iconic bar and restaurant in Havana which attracted artists, poets, writers and thinkers as well as being the claimed birthplace of the globally popular mojito cocktail. He became known as the Cantor de la Revolución, although his most famous work would - despite its clear political content - come several years later, as he composed the classic Hasta Siempre, Comandante (sometimes just called Hasta Siempre, as per the link above) as a celebration of Che Guevara in 1965, when he left the government. It has been covered dozens of times, not only by Cuban legends like Compay Segundo and Silvio Rodríguez, but also by internationally acclaimed performers like Robert Wyatt and Wolf Biermann. My reasoning for including Manzanillo on the route was not for its industrial heritage, though, nor to honour the musical voice of the revolution. Rather, it was to do with cycling. Women’s cycling, to be exact, where the Cuban flag is flying higher and more proudly than ever, albeit only on the jersey of one particular rider, who happens to be from Manzanillo.

Arlenis Sierra

Cuba did a surprise 1-2-3 at the Pan-American Championships in 2011, but the bigger surprise was that the winner, coming in solo in Guadalajara, Mexico on a tricky circuit, was 18-year-old junior prospect Arlenis Sierra. In 2012 she finished 5th in the Vuelta a El Salvador against a very good world field, beating the likes of Noemi Cantele, Rossella Ratto and Alena Amialiusik; she would go on through her early 20s becoming a major challenger all over Latin America and winning back to back Pan-American Championships in Puebla and Zacatecas. While a couple of races like the Vuelta a El Salvador had worldwide participation, though, a lot of these races kind of happened in a vacuum, hidden away from the highest levels of women’s cycling in Europe or the NRC in the US. Come 2016, however, Europe could no longer ignore her; she finished 2nd on the Mirador del Potrero climb in San Luís and won multiple stages and the GC in Costa Rica, before being invited to race the Tour de Brétagne with the UCI World Cycling Centre team, where she won two stages and the GC and with Cuba for the first time in several years opening up to professional contracts overseas for their riders, after some offers to race on the NRC had to be turned down owing to the lack of diplomatic support she could receive in the US, an offer came in from Europe and her results earned her a contract with the relatively low-budget but medium-profile Astana women’s team.

With access to the Women’s World Tour, she made waves finishing 2nd in the Trofeo Binda, being outsprinted by Coryn Rivera, and finishing 3rd at the Tour of California women’s race after being 3rd in the puncheuse finish at South Lake Tahoe. And although 2017’s Giro Rosa was one of the less selective routes we’ve seen in recent years, the fact she could even come 10th at the Giro was a major breakthrough. While you can only take people by surprise once, Sierra had become a known figure around the péloton and the public face of Cuban cycling back at home, finishing 7th in the Ronde van Drenthe and 4th in Gent-Wevelgem, before getting her first WWT wins with a stage of the Tour of California and the Tour of Guangxi one-day race. Although she was known for her fast finish, especially in stages requiring more durability to get to the end, even finishing on the podium of the Giro dell’Emilia atop the steep Bologna-San Luca climb, and winning the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race solo after a tactical move between the last two ascents and then escaping solo to drop Lucy Kennedy and take the line alone, not usually her modus operandi.

After the 2020 season, which was somewhat disappointing for Arlenis, but easy to wave away given different countries’ differing reactions to lockdown and opportunities to get out there and train, Astana withdrew and Sierra was on the AR Monex team, an Italian-based, Mexican-backed squad that emerged from its ashes. It was a solid return to form, but apart from another podium on San Luca, her wins and podiums were largely in smaller races, but nevertheless she drew the attention of the Movistar team, perhaps unsurprisingly as the largest and most prominent Spanish-speaking squad out there. Shorn of leadership responsibilities (Astana and AR Monex had relied on her quite heavily for results, while Movistar only had, you know, Annemiek van Vleuten), she built into the season, mostly again succeeding in small races (winning the Ruta del Sol outright after finishing 1st, 1st and 2nd in the three stages), and then returning to the top step of the podium in the WWT, winning a stage of the Tour de Romandie. Sierra doesn’t win so much as she used to now that she’s regularly racing WWT level fields, but she has become a dependable source of points for the Movistar team, with top 10s at races like Trofeo Binda, Ronde van Vlaanderen and Gent-Wevelgem, and stages of the Giro Donne, the Tour de Suisse and Itzulia Women.

This is a stage that Arlenis would like, if it were a women’s stage, in all fairness - there are a few climbs that will make it tricky for the purest of pure sprinters to contest, but not enough that the more durable types will be removed from contention entirely, and riders who wish to win by means other than sprinting will need to do some work to distance them. The first part of the stage, however, is archetypal flat stage terrain and more along the lines of stages 5 and 7 through the centre of the country. The first notable stop-off is Yara, which we avoided in stage 9 but has a crucial position in Cuban history, famous as the place where the very first rebel in documented Cuban history was burned at the stake, the Taíno leader Hatuey who organised a guerrilla campaign against Spanish colonial expansion in 1512, and it was also of course, as has already been mentioned in earlier stages, where El Grito de Yara, the first declaration of Cuban independence, was made, sparking the Ten Years’ War, or the first Cuban War of Independence. Previously a small sugar plantation town in the Manzanillo municipality, its significance earned it an identity of its own, and more recently it was the birthplace of another pair of revolutionaries, Harry Villegas and Huber Matos. Villegas was a loyal comrade to Che Guevara who fought with him not only in Cuba but also in Bolivia, and remained loyal to the last, also fighting on behalf of the Cuban voluntary mission in Angola and Namibia after Guevara’s death; Matos is a more complex figure, a former teacher in Manzanillo who escaped to Costa Rica after Batista’s coup and supported the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, even personally flying five tons of air cargo munitions and supplies to be dropped secretively in the mountains for the guerrillas. He became a commander in the rebel forces and the military leader of Camagüey after the revolution. However, Matos was more of a progressive socialist than a Communist and opposed the direction taken by Castro after seizing control of the country. He tried to resign but his initial resignation was not accepted; the second attempt to resign resulted in Camilo Cienfuegos being despatched to arrest him - the very journey from which Cienfuegos would not return, as his flight back to Havana disappeared from radar. Matos claims to have warned Cienfuegos that his popularity made him dangerous, but was nonetheless arrested and incarcerated for 20 years for his insubordination; a baying crowd, whipped up into a frenzy by the reactions to another counter-revolutionary at the time, called for his execution but Castro wisely spared him to prevent his martyrdom to the counter-revolutionary cause; after his release in 1979 he joined his family in Costa Rica and moved to the USA, from where he has participated in protests and oppositional movements in Cuba, as well as broadcasting uncensored news to the Cuban people from a radio station in Florida, similar to Radio Free Europe in the Cold War.

From Cruce Paralejo to Bayamo we retrace our steps from stage 9 in the opposite direction (Bayamo again hosts an intermediate sprint), but then we continue eastward, joining the Carretera Central, onward to Jiguaní, a stronghold of the independence fighters in the Guerra Necesaria. At the next town, Baire, we deviate from the main east-west thoroughfare of the nation to head southwards into the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, via our only - yes, remarkably - stretch of sterrato in the entire race, an 8km stretch from 60km to 52km from the stripe between Baire and Los Negros which includes 2,5km of uphill, but not at steep enough gradients to merit categorisation. There is a paved route from Contramaestre to Los Negros which would only extend the stage by a few kilometres, but I wanted to use this route to commemorate the Grito de Baire, a key declaration of insurrection in the first Cuban War of Independence. We are also just to the south of the battlefields of Dos Ríos, where Cuban national hero and martyr José Martí was killed in action by the Spanish colonial troops.

Once we arrive in Los Negros, the road becomes paved again, and we enter a circuit of 35km which we have one and a half laps of, taking in the villages of El Yayal, Comecará, Matías, and our stage town of Cruce de los Baños, the main urban area of the Tercer Frente (“Third Front”) municipality. 30.000 people live in Tercer Frente, around half of which in Cruce de los Baños, and the majority of the remainder in Matías. It is one of the few municipalities on the route which I haven’t included with any historical significance or Vuelta a Cuba relevance, but purely in the hunt for hilly stages and interesting topography to use for the purpose of race designing - although its alternative name of Doctor Mario Muñoz Monroy was given in honour of a local doctor who served with Castro in the storming of the Moncada Barracks. This is mainly an agricultural area whose economy is built around the cultivation of coffee and citrus fruit, and to a lesser extent cocoa.

Cruce de los Baños, finish area

Roads around here are fairly recently paved, but they are all nicely tarmacked on the circuit, meaning this will make for an interesting finale. The circuit is hilly, including two climbs, one of which we take twice. I did think about adding a further lap but I wanted to keep distances realistic and having had a couple of 190km+ stages with hills earlier on in the race I thought this would likely be better at around 160km, so this was the outcome.

Upon entering the circuit we have a slight downhill into the basin of the Río Mogote, one of those that drain into the reservoir above the Río Contramaestre, which gives the neighbouring municipality to its north (and its capital city) its name and is also one of the Dos Ríos in the battleground’s name. From the bridge crossing the river, we immediately start climbing, and this is the first - and last - climb of the stage, albeit on the first and second passages, as the small village of El Yayal sits on a crest above this gorge, which requires 1,6km of climbing at 6,6% to escape. There are around 46km remaining the first time we crest this summit, and just under 12km remaining the second time, so this offers some decent opportunities for action at least the second time around. The slightly larger village of Comecará lies at the base of the descent, which is easier in terms of gradients - 4-5% mostly - but does include a sequence of technical corners near the top. From here there is an uncategorised repecho - it really ought not to be decisive in and of itself and certainly wouldn’t from a large group, but if we have a small group here - as we may, after all it’s week 2 so there may well be unthreatening breaks allowed to go, or simply exhausted domestiques leaving leaders to do their own marking - then it does give an opportunity; there’s over a kilometre of uphill here, but the average is meagre. The last 650m average around 5% however, so it is enough to consider worth a dig on for some baroudeurs, especially the second time when it’s only 5-6km from the finish - however the finale is very, very straight and will favour the chase somewhat.

Finishing straight in Cruce de los Baños

After crossing the finishing line for the first time and taking the second intermediate sprint, rolling, slightly uphill terrain takes us to Matías, the second largest of the population centres in Tercer Frente. A two-stepped, uncategorised climb of 2,2km at 4% takes us up to La Jorobada, before a brief dip and rise around the Río Mogote once more. After passing through Matías, we take on the more significant of the two climbs on the circuit, the 2,1km at 7,1% up to the Alto de Juba, which crests at 22km from the line. This is where I suspect most reasonable moves for the stage will take place, not least because the toughest gradients in the stage are here, some reaching double digits.

Ramps and repechos in Tercer Frente

After a short plateau, the descent from here takes us back in to Los Negros; the descent is gradual at first but then has around 1,4km at 7%. At one stage I had this exact stage but with the circuit in the reverse direction, however, while that leads this run from Juba to Los Negros and then down to the Mogote into a climb of 5,6km in length, the meagre average reduces its value, with only that 1,4km at 7% being particularly noteworthy, as well as reducing the challenge of the El Yayal climb by making it a 4-5% grinder. Besides, you could only do half of the Juba climb from Los Negros the first time, not the full climb, so negating the value, and so I preferred to have this circuit in a clockwise direction. The run-in means we might still see a sprint, but it will be of durable folks. And the fact that most of the circuit is at least undulating, if not downright hilly, means it offers plenty for the puncheur and baroudeur. I see this as similar to the kind of routes we often get from races like the Tour de Brétagne, but transplanted to Latin America. If, given the nature of Cuban colonial history, you prefer to run your comparisons to Spanish cycling, then things like País Vasco “flat stages” or those repecho-laden finales in the Vuelta a Burgos are your comparison.

Or, for women’s cycling aficionados… this is the kind of stage Arlenis Sierra will like and be a contender in.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 11: Palma Soriano - Felicidad de Yateras, 140km

GPM:
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%
Alto del Boquerón (cat.2) 2,1km @ 9,8%

A short transfer to Contramaestre then takes us to the start of stage 11, in the city of Palma Soriano, again on the northern edges of the Sierra Maestra. The second-largest city in Santiago de Cuba province, this colonial city is home to 120.000 people and was formed by the merging of the spheres of influences of a number of cattle ranching areas in the vicinity of the Cauto river. It has grown rapidly since the arrival of the Carretera Central, and is now one of the main eastern stops on the as-yet-incomplete A1 Motorway. It is perhaps best known for being where José Martí’s body was brought after his death in the Battle of Dos Ríos, and as being the hometown of Ana Fidelia Quirot, one of Cuba’s most distinguished ever track and field athletes, a former 800m runner who still holds 5th on the all-tine fastest list (even if that time being recorded in 1989 does raise suspicions as to how it was achieved, given the climate of the time in the sport). She also ran the 400m, which was not so common at the time (usually 400 was considered the longest sprint, and 800 the shortest middle-distance, so athletes transferring between them were rare), where she won two golds each at the Pan-American and Central American and Caribbean Games, and it was where she had her first breakout, in 1983 at the age of 20, but her greatest achievements on the world stage were all at 800m. She was the favourite for the 1988 Olympic Games in the discipline, having gone all season undefeated and ranking #1 in the World (she in fact would be undefeated for three whole years from 1987 to 1990 in the discipline), however the Cuban boycott meant she had to withdraw, leaving the Olympic title the great gaping hole in her palmarès; she would fight to make up for lost time later in her career, but could only manage a silver in Barcelona, and a bronze in Atlanta; she remains arguably the greatest 800m runner without a gold medal to her name to this day. It wasn’t that she was fading, tough - in her mid-30s she was still an elite runner, in fact her two World Championship golds were scored in Gothenburg ’95 and Athens ’97, so at the ages of 32 and 34 respectively and after coming back from a tragic domestic accident while pregnant that killed her unborn child - admittedly less uncommon in the middle distance disciplines than the sprints, but nevertheless impressive longevity. Speaking of longevity, Palma Soriano is also the home of Orestes Kindelán, the most prolific hitter in Cuban domestic baseball history across a 21 year career with Avispas, and a winner of four Baseball World Cups and two Olympic gold medals with the then-dominant Cuban team.

Palma Soriano

Our first noteworthy stop is San Luís, the birthplace of legendary son musician Ibrahim Ferrer, a legendary musician who played as part of Los Bocucos for over 30 years and was one of the most recognisable performers in Cuba from the 1950s all the way to his retirement in 1991. However, he was coaxed out of retirement twice, first for the one-off Afro-Cuban All Stars project, but then more enduringly as one of the most prominent figures in the Buena Vista Social Club film and album, as the then-70-years-old Ferrer enjoyed a remarkable and unexpected revival and expansion of his influence into the wider world, even winning a Grammy in 2004 at 77 years of age (although he was unable to go to the USA to accept it due to sanctions), and just one year before his death.

We then have an early intermediate sprint in the municipality of Songo-La Maya, choosing La Maya, the second and larger of these, to host the sprint itself. Soon after this we relocate onto the as-yet-incomplete A1 autopista, as this is as far west as the eastern stretch has yet got to (it replaces the Carretera Central at San Luís, but loops south to Santiago de Cuba at Dos Caminos, before restarting east of La Maya) and follow it until exiting again at Niceto Pérez. This is the last town of note before we arrive in Guantánamo, a historic city that has become familiar to almost everybody worldwide in recent years not for its city life or culture but instead for its eponymous bay to the south, the last remaining US holding on Cuban soil and where a number of famous (and infamous) crimes against humanity were alleged against the US military, with apparent torture, sexual abuse, squalid and inhumane conditions and extorted confessions against prisoners in the military prison on-site, especially following a controversial document being posted on WikiLeaks in 2003. Guantánamo itself is served by the La Caimanera port which is adjacent to the US military site, and the Cubans have, since the revolution, on numerous occasions tried to argue the unlawfulness of the US site; the Americans for their part have cited that the lease they signed on the site had no expiration date and just because the Cuban constitution has since changed it does not affect their deal on the premises. The notoriety of the site as a detention base, however, has led to it - and its military code of GTMO, spoken as “Gitmo” - becoming notorious, and during his presidency Barack Obama attempted to close the camp, decrying it as a “sad chapter in American history” (evidently President Obama had not read much Latin American history either, it seems), but his attempts were stymied by Republican congressmen. It has been immortalised in film and television several times, with everything from hard-hitting drama to sophomoric humour like Harold & Kumar, as well as appearing in both of the most revered stealth video game franchises of all time, Splinter Cell (which tasked the player with escaping Guantánamo Bay), and Metal Gear Solid, which used the camp (using the fictionalised name Camp Omega) as the setting for Ground Zeroes, a stand-alone prologue to the final instalment in the franchise timeline.

I didn’t want to show any real pictures from Guantánamo Bay, so here’s Big Boss/Naked Snake/Venom Snake/Whoever the hell this is in the insanely convoluted Metal Gear timeline looking down on its facsimile

Guantánamo city, on the other hand, is a thriving city of over 200.000 which is one of the largest and most important, after Santiago de Cuba, in the Cuban East, and famous for its production of cotton and sugar cane.

Much less grim

Its name meaning “land between two rivers” in the Taíno language, the Carretera Central passes through the middle of town and it served as a market town since its founding in the late 18th Century for various traders around the plains of the east, and a resting spot between Baracoa or Moa and Santiago, since it would come after the requirement of crossing the mountains. It is largely a sporting city and most of its famous sons and daughters have come from sports disciplines, such as Golden Glove baseball player Luís Robert Jr, Pan-American Games double gold medal long jumper Jaime Jefferson, Olympic bronze and World silver medal-winning discus thrower Luís Delís, Olympic bronze medalist triple jumper Yargelis Savigne and - although coming only after her defection to the United States - gymnast Annia Hatch. The city has, however, got no fewer than four gold medal-winning Olympic champions as its progeny - boxer Joel Casamayor won bantamweight gold in Barcelona 1992; “El Ciclón de Guantánamo” Yuriorkis Gamboa won gold in the flyweight class in Athens 2004 (before defecting two years later); at the same games, Yumileidi Cumbá won shot putt gold (which I’m sure resident forum shot putt expert RedheadDane would have been very angry had I failed to mention), while the most successful of all was Dayron Robles, a specialist in the high hurdles who won Olympic gold over 110m in 2008, and also two World Indoor golds over 60m in 2006 and 2010 to go with it.

Perhaps more significant than any of them, though, would be Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, an orphaned Afro-Cuban who had been adopted by a Cuban couple (whose surnames he adopted in kind) who had joined the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces with ambition of becoming a fighter pilot. To this end he was sent to the Soviet Union for training, then flew reconnaissance missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, fought in Vietnam and eventually travelled to the USSR to become part of their Intercosmos program. Travelling along with Yuri Romanenko aboard Soyuz-38 to dock at the Salyut-6 space station and conduct experiments in 1980, Tamayo Méndez thereby became not just the first Cuban, but the first Latin American and simultaneously the first person of African origin to go into space. He became the first recipient of the Hero of the Republic of Cuba award, as well as the second Cuban (after Fidel Castro) to have the Hero of the Soviet Union distinction and medal bestowed upon him - as well as being the first and, as far as I can tell only, black recipient of the award. Not bad for an orphan who started work as a child as a shoe-shiner, hey?

Leaving Guantánamo city, there are around 20km of gradually uphill terrain until we reach a circuit which takes up the remains of the course, at least until the last couple of kilometres. We have three and a half laps of an 8km circuit - yes, it’s a little short, but there’s no choice - that includes a shortish but significant climb that we will therefore take four times. The steeper of the two roads that connect Guantánamo to the altiplano (well, that’s a bit of an excessive term for what is really a plateau at only 450m; it’s more like the Meseta in Spain than the Altiplanos of Colombia, Venezuela or Ecuador that might spring more to your mind in a cycling context) on which the stage town of Felicidad lies is a couple of kilometres long but averages as near as damnit to 10%, which starts decently steep and then gets steeper, the final 2/3 averaging nearly 11%. It’s not the hardest of climbs, but it’s going to be tough enough to make a difference. I think this profile matches up pretty perfectly to that of San Luca di Bologna, the traditional finish of the Giro dell’Emilia, which of course also finishes on a circuit including this super steep ascent, as you can see from this profile of the 2023 edition. The circuit there is around 8,5km in length and so I feel like the Giro dell’Emilia is a perfect kind of guide to what we can expect here, as although we have one fewer ascents of the final ramp (four instead of five) and there are both no climbs preceding it and around 60 fewer kilometres’ racing to do, the fact of the matter is, the field participating here will be a couple of levels below the one we tend to see in a race whose winners’ list in recent years includes Enric Mas, Aleksandr Vlasov and Primož Roglič, you know?

Climb of the Alto del Boquerón

The four ascents of the Alto del Boquerón come at 27,2km, 19,3km, 11,4km and 3,4km from the line, and the summit serves as the boundary between the municipality of Manuel Tames municipality and the municipality of Yateras, which is where we finish our stage today, in the second largest settlement in the municipality, Felicidad de Yateras. Yateras itself actually links back to one of my more recent projects in that it has been, since 1977, twinned with Boulder, Colorado (an oddity given the lack of diplomatic ties between the two countries of course). It was very tempting to continue on to Palenque, the largest, and that would have given us an additional climb as well as giving us a finish in a town of around 10.000 inhabitants rather than about 6.000 (which makes Felicidad de Yateras our smallest stage host, at least out of actual places that are settlements rather than resorts or historical monuments which are likely to be included for touristic purposes and are in municipalities with higher population anyway), but it would have been adding 5km at 5%, a descent of similar characteristics, and then best part of 10km flat to the line and I don’t think that would have done as much for the racing unfortunately. It also serves as the entry point to Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, a UNESCO-inscribed heritage site celebrating its incredible biodiversity and karst landscape, named (despite the odd Spanish nomenclature) for Alexander von Humboldt, who visited the area in the early 19th Century. The summit of the climb is marked by a sculpture that advertises the nearby entrance to the other point of interest in Yateras, the Parque Zoológico de Piedras, effectively a park and gardens decorated with sculptures of a variety of animals carved in stone and dotted throughout the premises.

Summit of the climb - straight on takes us to Felicidad de Yateras, and turning right takes us into the Parque Zoológico. We emerge from a road on the left, opposite the park entrance, which is not clear in this photograph but links up to the road in the previous photo, and then heading back down the road, toward the camera, takes us down the winding, gradual descent of about 5km at 4,5%

This placing of a steep climb before a not-quite-descent of around 3km to the line suggests something in common with Vuelta stages to Xorret del Catí or similar climbs, but this ascent is only just over half that length even if we do take it multiple times. Something like the 2011 Vuelta al País Vasco stage to Zumarraga may make for an apter comparison. Either way - four times up this climb should hopefully create some gaps and make for some interesting action, as GC men can’t afford to let their competitors up the road, but simultaneously it offers the breakaway opportunities too. This one ought to be fun, and coming after 10 days of racing there may well be some tired legs to take advantage of even in a short stage like this.

Felicidad de Yateras, finishing town

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 12: Guantánamo - Baracoa, 145km

GPM:
Alto del Gobernador (cat.3) 1,3km @ 6,5%
Alto de Cotilla (cat.1) 10,2km @ 4,4%
Alto de Yumuri (cat.3) 1,0km @ 8,9%

Ah, now it’s time for a Cuban classic, as we take on one of the great feats of engineering of the Cuban Revolution, the famous La Farola Highway, en route to our easternmost point in the race. We descend back down the hill after yesterday’s stage for a rest day in Guantánamo city, but today’s stage is likely to be familiar to all of the nationals in the péloton at least - just not this way.

Ciudad Guantánamo

I already discussed the city of Guantánamo in the previous stage, so we’ll get straight down to the business of the stage, which begins with a short run to the outlying village of Glorieta and then a short uphill ramp of a road called the Alto del Gobernador, which features a mirador at its summit that offers views over the city (and at least part of the US naval base). After that we head on to the 120km road known as La Farola, which was one of the great early achievements of the PCC after assuming power, as until then - yes, in the early 1960s - the fabled eastern city of Baracoa had only been accessible by boat. While cities only accessible by boat or air remain to this day, these are often in relatively inaccessible areas or where distances from other cities are enormous; Juneau, Alaska and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in Russia are two others that spring to mind, but each have their own road networks covering their sphere of influence. Baracoa had been an island unto itself within the island of Cuba, cut off from inland transit by the Sierra de Purial mountain range, until the completion of the highway, which had been planned but oft-delayed during the Batista regime.

Following the completion of the highway, it became a focal point of the Vuelta a Cuba, and indeed many editions saw the race start in Baracoa and a stage along the La Farola Highway became a staple of the race, usually starting with a prologue and then a road stage that followed the road to Guantánamo on the second day. Carlos Cardet, the most prominent Cuban rider of his day, won the La Farola course, as did former amateur World Champion Bernd Drogan of the DDR, his compatriot Uwe Raab, Viktor Demidenko, Eduardo Alonso, Jonas Romanovas (the Lithuanian then going by the Russified version of his name, Ivan Romanov), Zdzisław Wrona, Osmany Álvarez and Viktor Klimov. When the race was resurrected in the early 2000s, the very first stage was a replica of the Baracoa-Guantánamo stages of yesteryear, Pedro Pablo Pérez emerging victorious in both of the first two editions of the reborn race, and then Damián Martínez winning likewise in both 2002 and 2003, before Pérez reasserted his dominance the year after, and, winning the identical stage in 2006, made himself very much the king of La Farola. The last couple of editions were slight curios, with 2009’s stage won by former Major Junior ice hockey player Kéven Lacombe, and 2010’s final edition’s La Farola stage being won by Miguel Ubeto, a Venezuelan journeyman who had an unlikely flirtation with World Tour cycling after being promoted to Androni at age 35 and Lampre at age 36 - and remains active on a part-time basis back at home to this day.

Since the demise of the international, UCI-categorised Vuelta a Cuba, a national calendar, amateur equivalent of the race has taken place, namely the Clásico Guantánamo-La Habana, which was established in 2014 and after an initial 9-stage edition quickly grew to match the two weeks of the international race. As its name suggests, it would start in Guantánamo, usually beginning with a criterium, rather than in Baracoa as the Vuelta a Cuba had, but the La Farola route was brought back for 2018’s edition which indeed, despite the nomenclature, began with a road stage from Baracoa to Guantánamo which was won by Yan Carlos Árias. For 2019, the race was reduced down to 10 days and rebranded as the Clásico Nacional, but started with the same exact stage - won by the same exact rider. A|so in 2019, the Gran Premio La Farola was initiated, a three day, four stage race which would essentially be all about linking the two cities of Guantánamo and Baracoa, featuring an ITT and a criterium on one day, and two road stages incorporating the La Farola highway, either between the two main cities, or stopping off at municipalities such as San António del Sur, or La Maquina, the easternmost municipality on the entire island. After a couple of years’ absence due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it returned in 2023 and featured a final stage which this stage is an exact replica of, which was won by teenage espoir Randol Izquierdo, enabling him to snatch the overall GC. Just to add to the cycling involvement over this neck of the woods, the Vuelta a Cuba Oriental was introduced in 2022, a short stage race covering the former Oriente provinces, and which has opened in both editions to date with a road stage from Baracoa to Guantánamo along the ever-popular route.

Yans Carlos Árias wins in Guantánamo

Péloton in the Gran Prémio La Farola

So, Libertine, I hear you say, enough about the historic races, what does this course look like? I get you. It’s quite scenic, as you can imagine, through the mountains of the east. Before that, though, the first 70km or so are flat and such that you wonder what the challenge was that caused such a delay in establishing the road? We have our first intermediate of the day in San António del Sur, which with 25.000 inhabitants is our largest stopping point between the two stage hosts, We continue to hug the coastal road until our second intermediate sprint at Cajobabo, commemorating the isolated, hidden beaches where José Martí first disembarked back on Cuban soil in 1895 in order to precipitate the Guerra Necesaria, and then the climbing begins. Let’s have a bit of a look at the road, since the Cuban authorities are so proud of it, shall we?

The climbing, inasmuch as it is in earnest, begins in Las Guásimas, and has the most severe ascent almost immediately. 10,2km @ 4,4% as an overall climbing total makes it seem like it really isn’t too much, but it is worth noting that half of that is basically false flat; the first 4,2km of that average 8% and then the final 6km average only around 2%, so very much the categorisation is about that first part of the climb. In all honesty it’s pretty generously granted 1st category, but since 2km at 10% got cat.2 yesterday, this is several times as long so I felt that cat.1 was earned - just about. Especially given the somewhat inconsistent and unpredictable GPM awards in this part of the world (meaning Latin America in general, not anything specific to Cuba or the Caribbean).

After hitting the high point of the road, the Alto de Cotilla, which is host to a scenic mirador which you can see on the hilltop above the road in that image, we have a short and sharp descent of 2,8km at 6% into the hamlet of Yumuri, where we cross the river of the same name, and then climb up to a secondary crest with a short, punchy climb of a kilometre at around 9%. This double summit comes with Cotilla at 34km from home and the secondary summit at 29km from home, so a little far for anything more than speculative action, but it is still possible, especially deep into week 2 of the race, especially if this is action from the breakaway who will be expecting a chance to duke out the stage, because solo or small group moves in this kind of terrain is kind of their staple diet. We then have a few kilometres on the plateau before it gradually turns into ever more of a descent, taking us back down approaching sea level to Paso de Cuba, before a flat final 15km as we hug the coastline once more, taking in Cuba’s far eastern boundaries.

Looking down to the Caribbean coast from the Alto de Yumuri

In many ways, the isolation of the eastern edge of Cuba prior to the construction of the La Farola road is very surprising; Baracoa (officially Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa) is the oldest Spanish settlement in Cuba, having been founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar in 1511 on the site of one of Columbus’ first landing spots. Often nicknamed Ciudad Primada due to this status, its name apparently derives from an Arauaca word meaning a sea port or coastal settlement. Columbus apparently set a cross in the vicinity known as Cruz de la Parra to mark the spot, and after Velázquez established his personal villa here it became known as the first capital city of the Cuban colony, the seat of the first governors and has some of the oldest remaining colonial architecture and monuments remaining on the island.

However, as Cuba became more intensively explored and settled by the Spanish, it became ever more difficult to rule the island from the isolated city on its eastern coast, and so the capital was moved west; Baracoa became a haven for black market trading and piracy, especially with the British and French. This also lent it a certain sanctity because of the difficulty in regulating it - many from the French part of Hispaniola would escape here when fleeing the Haitian Revolution, and many exiled nationalists such as José Martí and António Maceo would choose Baracoa as their landing point when they returned to Cuba in order to foment national awakenings and uprisings against the colonial powers, as while the city was fortified, the difficulty of procuring reinforcements to the three forts overlooking the city meant that it could be overrun.

Although it offers great historic sights and an idyllic location, however, Baracoa remains a primarily agrarian centre, with cultivation of fruit and cocoa still its main economic driver, and tourism kept relatively limited by the difficulty of access - too far to travel for many ordinary Cubans, too out of the way for many overseas visitors who will typically prioritise Havana or the beach resorts, and its small airport only serves regional traffic. However, for those who are hunting a nature escape, it is an excellent base, being close to the eastern entrance to the Parque Alejandro Humboldt and overlooked by the iconic El Yunque, a table mountain that serves as the city’s Hausberg, and Salto Fino, the 20th largest waterfall in the world. Realistically, this will be a reduced sprint or a stage for the baroudeurs, with the flat run-in and 29km from the final summit to the line, but there are possibilities there should a rider want to get creative in their need to gain time late in the race - although they may take care not to pay for their efforts in the following days…

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 13: Moa - Holguín (Loma de la Cruz), 194km

GPM:
Loma de Rejondones (cat.3) 1,7km @ 6,2%
Loma de Rejondones (cat.3) 1,7km @ 6,2%
Loma de la Cruz (cat.3) 1,1km @ 5,8%

The city of Moa, on the northeastern coast of Cuba, about 60km up the coast road from Baracoa, is a relative backwater for the Vuelta a Cuba, as given the propensity for the race to use the La Farola highway, it has never hosted the national race as far as my records-checking can tell; I did check through to find a few stages marked as being “Baracoa - Baracoa” which may have gone there as an out-and-back, but they were all identical in length to future years’ Baracoa - Guantánamo stages with ensuing stages from Guantánamo to Gran Piedra so it suggests to me that these were mislabelled stages that used La Farola. As a result I therefore think this will be a brand new stage host for the race!

It is possibly not surprising that Moa has not been at the front and centre of the national race, given that compared to old colonial cities like Baracoa and Guantánamo, it’s actually more of an eyesore than a matter of national pride; the city is one of the youngest in Cuba, and was only established in 1939; its expansion was largely precipitated by the discovery of large nickel and cobalt deposits in the nearby area, and a large proportion of the 70.000 inhabitants of the city are employed in the industries involved in the mining and subsequent processing of these metals, which is divided between the state-owned Cubaníquel company and the Canadian mining concern Sherritt International and responsible for the vast majority of the city’s economic performance. Like many other cities involved in the processing of these kinds of metals such as the notoriously barely-habitable Norilsk, however, this comes with the downside of deep environmental spoilage, and the city is also one of the most polluted in the country, with contaminated soil and water in the coastal area and as a result life expectancy is lower than in the rest of the country, meaning it has the youngest population as frequently older inhabitants will get out after their stint working the mines or metal processing.

Luckily for our riders, though, we aren’t going to be sticking around here for long, as we immediately head down the rolling coastal road on the Circuito Norte, the second longest road in Cuba after the Carretera Central. Essentially, almost the entire distance of our stage shows off the non-expressway part of this road as it heads through Holguín province, mostly flat with a few rolling sections. For the most part this means cruising through smaller towns and cities on our way, with only a few notable locations to pick up, such as the access point to Cayo Mambí in Frank País municipality, named for one of the revolutionaries that fought alongside Fidel Castro. Nicaro-Levisa is one of the larger settlements in the area, but it is rather two villages that have combined with one another rather than one; the road passes through the latter while the former is on the coast. Mayarí, an 18th-century colonial settlement, is one of the more interesting, having been immortalised three times in song by the veteran trovador Compay Segundo, most notably in “Chan Chan”, the lead-off track and arguably the best known on the Buena Vista Social Club album that brought many of these musicians to the public eye late in life - celebrating the travel along the north coast to retreat from city life in pursuit of simpler, happier times of youth.

We, however, are going the opposite way to Compay and his Buena Vista Social Club colleagues; from Mayarí we go to Cueto, then Marcané and Alto Cedro. Strangely, apart from this namecheck from Segundo, there isn’t much to distinguish the location, suggesting that this may have been based on personal memories or experiences when travelling rather than any historical significance behind the choice or any shared history among Cubans to suggest these locations are synonymous with holidays or vacations, in the way that many locations elsewhere evoke particular shared memory among the population. Either way, due to its relative size - 30.000 people in the municipality, around half of which in the centre itself - Cueto gets to host our first intermediate sprint.

At Caballeria we then swing north, and follow the road in a northwesterly direction up toward Holguín, and reach the town of Báguanos. Well, we kind of do. We reach the junction for it, as it is not specifically on the Circuito Norte, though its access road is. Passing this marker point then leads us to a short categorised climb on the Loma de Rejondones, a short steep road that elevates us up onto the Rejondones plateau, a slight elevation on which the city of Holguín stands. This is not an especially tough climb - a little under 2km at a little over 6% - but it is definitely worthy of categorisation. The interesting thing here, however, is that as the Loma de Rejondones road is somewhat notorious for vehicular accidents descending it, the Cuban authorities have also paved an adjacent road from El Manquito (the village at the summit) down into Báguanos village itself, enabling us to take a lap of a 13,3km circuit and ascend the climb a second time (the alternative road is less steep but slower, given it detours and also includes urban traffic), placing the two crestings of the climb at 48 and 35km from the line respectively. Not close enough to make anything but the most speculative of moves if you’re a GC guy, but maybe a stage hunter could be allowed some rope here.

Once we’re on the plateau for a second time, however, it’s a fast and undulating but mostly flat route into Holguín, Cuba’s fourth largest city. With over 350.000 inhabitants, this is one of the oldest cities in Cuba, having been established in 1523 by Captain Francisco García Holguín, who had been bequeathed the land on which the city originally stood by Velázquez de Cuéllar. García named the city San Isidoro, adding his maternal surname in honour of his mother’s family, and over time, like many cities of the Spanish New World (who honestly says “Santa Fe de Bogotá” or “Santiago de León de Caracas”?) the Catholic part of the nomenclature has been dropped over time to differentiate the city from other places with the same name and so Holguín has become the accepted term for the city.

The site the city was focused upon had previously been settled by the Taíno people, but a combination of introduced diseases decimating their populace and brutal suppression of their attempted uprisings resulted in their being wiped out from the area, although artefacts from this era remain and are displayed in the city’s museums. It has largely been a somewhat peaceful city, but it was held by rebel mambises (a term for the nationalist guerrillas, from an Afro-Antillean term “mambí” which was applied to nationalists all across the Greater Antilles at the time) from 1868 to 1872, as a result the colonial forces made sure to put it on the railroad when establishing the island’s infrastructure post-Industrial Revolution, so that it be better served for reinforcement. The city’s connection to the Ten Years’ War largely was tied to its position as the birthplace of Calixto García, a general for the rebels in three separate national uprisings, the Ten Years’ War, the Guerra Chiquita and the Guerra Necesária. The grandson of his namesake, a general who had fought in the Venezuelan War of Independence, García was a criollo who opposed the colonial rule from a position of ideology, and in fact had attempted suicide to avoid capture in 1872, but after failure remained imprisoned back in Spain until being released as part of the terms of the Paz de Zanjón, whereupon he travelled first to Paris then to New York, joined António Maceo’s forces and contributed to his second uprising.

Gradually, thanks to his military prowess, usurping Maceo’s role in the Cuban guerrilla army, he took many major cities including Bayamó and Las Tunas, and when the Americans intervened, he helped secure their landing spots and fought alongside them to neutralise Spanish guerrilla tactics due to his knowledge of same from the time prior to the rebels taking these cities - for which assistance he was awarded the accolade of… no wait, the Americans denied him entrance to Santiago de Cuba to claim the city because the American generals did not want to share the spoils of victory. One day after the war ended, García was on a diplomatic mission to Washington DC as a representative of the negotiations on behalf of the new Cuban leadership when he fell ill suddenly and died, which was later attributed to pneumonia. For years he lived on in - curiously - American slang, thanks to Elbert Hubbard’s essay A Message to García - for a period in the early 20th Century, to “send a message to García” was a term meaning to accept a difficult or thankless task. Closer to home, the main park in Holguín was named for him and a statue to the rebel liberator was erected in 1916, and since 1976 his visage has adorned the Cuban 50 peso banknote. His name was also given to the city’s baseball stadium.

More recent sons and daughters of Cuba have been more from sports and entertainment, however; the opera singer Eglise Gutiérrez calls the city home, while two of the musicians connected to the Buena Vista Social Club film/group/movement are from the city too - the pre-revolutionary popular singer Puntillita, who later appeared in the Afro-Cuban All Stars and from there became involved in the BVSC project, providing lead vocals for two tracks on the associated album and backing vocals on two others, and the composer Faustino Oramas, better known as “El Guayabero” after his most famous composition among other alter egos which make tracking his oeuvre difficult, who contributed the song “Candela”. It was also the hometown of the dissident poet and writer Reinaldo Arenas, a former contributor to the revolutionary war on the side of Castro who had been ostracised and felt distanced by the movement thanks to his sexuality and opposing the indoctrination school of teaching that was favoured by the PCC post-revolution, with his literary works courting extreme controversy due to these opinions and their moral implications; he survived imprisonment by helping write and smuggle letters to loved ones for violent criminals, before fleeing to the US as part of the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. Now based in the US, Arenas continued to write and serve as a public face of anti-governmental dissidence in Cuba, but he would die young; in 1990 Arenas, who was suffering from AIDS at the time, depressed and in failing health, would intentionally overdose and pass away at the age of 47. More positively, at least for the regime, Holguín has provided Cuba with two Olympic gold medalists - the judoka Odalis Revé, who won gold in Barcelona 1992 along with two world silver medals, two Pan-American Games golds and four Pan-American Championships golds in the 66kg category; and the lightweight boxer [urhttps://www.mediastorehouse.co.uk/p/773/mario-kindelan-25115625.jpg.webp]Mario Kindelán[/url], cousin of domestic baseball legend Orestes Kindelán (who I mentioned in an earlier stage) and winner of two Olympic golds in Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004, along with three world titles, two Pan-American titles, two Goodwill Games titles and two Central American and Caribbean Games titles including a five year unbeaten streak from 1999 until his retirement after the 2004 Games.

While Holguín is the host city for the stage, the finish is not in the middle of town; instead, this is simply home to a final intermediate sprint, just 4,6km from the line, alongside the aforementioned Parque Calixto García. Rather, the finish is at a viewpoint overlooking the city on the Loma de la Cruz, an iconic landmark of the city offering impressive vistas, which can be accessed by two means. Either a 450-step stairway from the city for pedestrians, or a road from the northwest side of town which, after being accessed by a couple of kilometres of false flat, is 1100m at around 6%, maxing at 9%, so not a super challenging climb, kind of a slightly easier Cauberg in nature. Translating as “hill of the cross”, the summit features a scenic mirador which is marked by - you guessed it - a cross.

View into Holguín from the Loma de la Cruz

Stairway up to Loma de la Cruz from Holguín

Slight gaps are to be expected here when it comes to the main contenders; it’s not a hard final climb, but a few seconds can be won and lost. If bonus seconds are still available it might see some action, otherwise this will be one for the break. It’s the last hilly stage, so Zam’s request is hopefully now fully fulfilled, but there are still two stages remaining.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 14: Holguín - Gran Piedra, 190km

GPM:
Puerto Boniato (cat.2) 4,2km @ 6,6%
Las Lajas (cat.3) 1,3km @ 5,7%
La Gran Piedra (cat.ESP) 13,4km @ 8,1%

Ah, the big mountaintop finish to signal the final weekend, where would we be without it? To be honest, in many races, better off. But here, it’s just a matter of pure logic to have this as the final major canvas on which the contenders are to paint. The rouleurs and less adept mountain goats have had to make their time up before this, and now the grimpeurs, who have been at a disadvantage - especially those who need longer climbs - since the rest day, have their final chance to shine. And it’s a wholly different beast of a climb to the ones we’ve seen in the previous MTFs at Topes de Collantes and Alto del Naranjo, one that fans of WT level cycling and Europeans should be far more familiar with - not some insane wall with gradients to make Javier Guillén baulk, not some multi-stepped chaos, but a classic, bona fide Alpine-style HC.

Well, sort of. We’ll get to it.

On the plus side for the riders, as we’re getting to the end of a two-week stage race, there is no transfer at all for them after yesterday’s stage, at least not unless you count just coming down into the centre of Holguín from the hilltop above it at least. We’ve essentially done something of a loop-de-loop around the eastern tip of the island, and now we’re heading south-south-east in pursuit of our grand finale. The first part of the stage essentially - nay, literally - retraces our steps from the tail end of the previous stage, as far as El Manguito and Báguano, and on the lower plateau toward Cueto, but then we turn southwards and head toward the south coast again.

Soon after this, still in Cueto municipality, we pass Marcané, which is the gateway to Birán, a small village which is nevertheless iconic in Cuba as a farmhouse to the north of the village has been transformed into a museum, the Casa Natal de Fidel Castro, which is precisely what it sounds like: the birthplace and childhood home of Cuba’s long-time leader, and his brothers and sisters who also played key roles throughout the history of Cuba. I’ve included a fair amount of Communist hagiography in this (and other) race(s) before, of course, and having passed over the opportunity to give a full history of Che Guevara, there is far too much to be said about Fidel and his siblings to give them a full history here (as opposed to some of the unfairly maligned or forgotten contributors to the history that I like to highlight), but nevertheless it is pretty difficult to manage a trip around Cuba without seeing physical examples of the veneration and reverence afforded (and imposed somewhat mandatorily) by the man that controlled the country for over 50 years.

Although he was the one in charge and the popular face of the revolution and of the Cuban leadership afterward, the actual roles filled by Fidel are not always clear, and sources conflict on when he actually adopted his position as the First Secretary of the Communist Party - in fact, at the time of the Revolution, technically Blas Roca was still in charge, having led the party since 1932, been a key contributor to protests that overthrew the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and oversaw the transition of the Communists from a fringe protest group to a national power; as such he was still the leader in 1959 but largely ceremonially; he had helped legitimise the party, but also following on from this had helped legitimise Batista’s role by backing him against the Fascists - a fact that would be used against Batista when he attempted to undermine Castro and the others on the hard left. Having gone into voluntary exile following Batista’s coup in 1952, he returned as a symbolic leader of the Party with the success of the Revolution and enacted a series of reorganisations of the splintered party and its orbiters that essentially served as a coronation of Fidel Castro as the chosen leader.

Although the best known, of course, Fidel was not the only one of the family to have significant involvement in the Revolution. Although not militarily active, the eldest of the boys, Ramón Castro served as their quartermaster and was tasked with maintaining supply chains, pipelines, procuring food and weapons, and even manufacturing fuel. However, while he may have spent many years at the front of the Revolution and was a founder member of the post-reorganisation PCC, Ramón also as the eldest brother had always, prior to the Revolution, been expected by the family to carry on the family farm, a dream and duty he always held close, and always kept one foot firmly grounded in his agrarian origins. While he helped oversee and manage the country’s sugar production for several years under his brothers’ rule, Ramón also opposed collectivisation and resisted the attempts to apply this policy to the family holdings, an irreconcilable difference of opinion that led to him being publicly denounced - although he was able to maintain a close enough relationship with his brothers to remain in the mix, albeit in a more background role, for decades until his death at the age of 91; wearing the same style of beard and fatigues, he would frequently be mistaken for his brother, or told that he looked like Fidel - to which the more jovial Ramón would often respond with a cheery riposte that actually, as the elder of the two, it was Fidel that looked like him.

His opposition to the collectivisation policies were recounted by his younger sister Juanita, one of four female Castro siblings, and who had also helped procure weapons to supply the revolutionaries, having been based in the US in 1958. Feeling betrayed by the ever-increasing role of Communism in the post-revolutionary government, Juanita would emigrate to Mexico in 1964 and eventually to the USA, where she would collaborate with the CIA. She is an interesting and complex character bound by both her disillusionment and her family loyalty; shielded somewhat from consequence for some time by her familial ties, her home became an informal meeting point for anti-Communist and oppositional thought in the early 1960s, and when she defected she called a press conference to denounce her siblings (eventually becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1984), but on the other hand she also sued Castro’s illegitimate daughter for publishing memoirs that Juanita claimed were defamatory about not her but the family as a whole - before publishing her own tell-all memoir a few years later. Finally, of course, there’s Raúl, aged between Fidel and Juanita, and one of the military leaders during the Revolution, for which he was rewarded with the role at the head of the Cuban Armed Forces for half a century. Raúl served as the interim leader as Acting President from 2006 during his brother’s illness, after which he assumed the role of President from 2008 and as First Secretary of the Communist Party in 2011. He stood down from the former role in 2018 and the latter in 2021, being succeeded in both roles by the current incumbent, Miguel Díaz-Canel, the first leader to not have been active in the Revolution itself - however as First Secretary he effectively maintained oversight over the President and so was considered the de facto leader of the country until the handover of the party reins three years later. Despite many reservations about the continued Castro dynastic rule, and Raúl’s somewhat questionable decisions and controversies earlier in life (as mentioned in an earlier stage, many suspect he may have been behind Camilo Cienfuegos’ fatal flight, removing a rival for secondary power and a more moderate voice with cache in the room), however, the elderly Raúl presided over a surprising level of rapprochement with the US, appearing in public shaking hands with then-US President Barack Obama, a deal brokered by Pope Francis I, in a remarkably cosmopolitan move for the often very inward-looking Cuban state; later full diplomatic ties were re-established in 2015 and Obama even visited the island the following year, however this was short-lived and Castro was himself re-sanctioned following his support of Nicolás Maduro in the 2019 Venezuelan Crisis. Retiring at age 89, Castro may have passed over his primary responsibilities, but he does retain a seat on the National Assembly to this day, at age 93.

Fidel and Ramón Castro with François Mitterand, 1974

Juanita Castro talking to anti-Communists at the Cuban Mission of New York in the late 70s

Raúl Castro between brothers-in-arms Che Guevara and Raúl’s actual brother, Fidel

We continue along a flat route before intersecting the start of stage 11, and holding an intermediate sprint as we pass through Palma Soriano. This time there’s no steps to retrace, however, as we cross over and continue to head south through the eastern parts of the Sierra Maestre, past the Gota Blanca hydroelectric project and on to the Puerto de Moya, one of the most commonly-ascended climbs in the history of the Vuelta a Cuba. Except… we’re not really climbing it, because it’s one of those classically lopsided climbs, where one side is on a slightly higher plateau so there’s only false flat on one side. You know, think of those Spanish passes like Escudo, Urkiola, Somiedo or Pajáres. Except noticeably smaller, since the actual climb side of Moya, the one we’re descending, is only 3,5km at around 5%. However, frequently in old times, after the opening stages brought us to Santiago de Cuba, the ensuing stage from Santiago to either Bayamó or Holguín would have this as a GPM en route. Instead of this, however, we trace along the southern edge of the mountains and climb the more severe and serious Puerto de Boniato, historically the access point for Santiago for most of the island, a twisty and formerly cobbled mountain road that has survived generations before being rendered somewhat obsolete by the coming of the A1 Autovía.

Archival image of Puerto Boniato from days of yore

Nowadays, with the coming of the motorways, the road is much quieter, and is known for the splendid views from its mirador, and as a launchpad for extreme sports pastimes, with hang-gliders and gliders frequently setting off from the summit. You can see a little of it here as well as briefly some of the road in its present state near the end of that video. The modern climb is hardly super challenging, at least not compared to what follows, being a little over 4km at around 6,5-7%, wearing its toughest gradients near the bottom with the first 1500m averaging 8,3%. Cresting at 50km from home, realistically it’s just a warmup climb here, but fatigue may mean we lose some of the most chronic climbers of the bunch given we’re on the penultimate day of a two week race. We descend into El Cristo, an outlying village of Santiago de Cuba municipality, but while we do head down the main road back into the geographical alcove that the city inhabits, we take a side road that enables us to avoid the city (more of it tomorrow, spoiler alert, although that’s really not much of a secret), and take another minuscule climb, the 1300m dig to Las Lajas. We have a second intermediate sprint in another outlying suburb that is being subsumed by Santiago, Vista Alegre, before heading due east to Las Guásimas. And then, se armó un zapatiesto.

Yes, it’s La Gran Piedra, or the Great Rock, an icon of Cuba and the highest point in the eastern Sierra Maestra, and also the longest and biggest and baddest continuous cycling climb on the whole island. At 1249m it is the highest point in its region, and it is paved up past 1100m; after this you must walk the remaining distance up to the summit and the small number of amenities beyond it, including a restaurant/café and the Cafetal La Isabelica. Its challenging access made it a popular site for rebels to hide out in, but the ongoing build of the road to the summit and its proximity to Santiago had resulted in it becoming too accessible for this purpose, but the difficulty in ascending the road made it a perfect hideout for traders, which has resulted in a lot of tourist trap stalls and stands cropping up on the way to the summit, which is marked by, well, a Great Rock. A huge volcanic mass measuring 51 metres wide, 25 metres high and 30 metres long, this colossal outcrop weighs over 63.000 tonnes and is home to an observatory and a mirador from which you can see all the way to Guantánamo.

While the rock has been there as long as records have been established, the cafes, the traders and the road have not, however. Obviously during immediate post-Revolution times, things were somewhat frugal, but as the Vuelta a Cuba began to develop, showing off development to the Cuban populace became a key factor in the race’s organisation, and much like the completion of the La Farola road made for a regular stage from Baracoa to Guantánamo in order to demonstrate this, in 1966, for the first time, the Gran Piedra access road was introduced to the race as a spectacle in order to introduce ordinary Cubans to the sights from the summit and the mirador. And what a special climb it was, unlike anything that had ever been seen before, even the Topes de Collantes climb.

Travelog from the La Gran Piedra mirador, 2024

Look at that challenge there. It’s a legitimate Hors Catégorie climb in any cycling; the overall figures are somewhere similar to many well-known favourites from European cycling - the Col de Joux-Plane (13km @ 7,6%), Lagos de Enol (the end of the steep part of Covadonga)(12km @ 8%), Alpe d’Huez (13,8km @ 8,2%) and Passo di Fedaia (FEDAIA!!!!!!!)(14,2km @ 7,5%). Not only that, but the first 2,5km are more or less false flat, and the final 500m are flattish also; the remaining 11km average 9,2%, a very savage, steep gradient that puts it in a similar kind of vein to Passo di Pampeago (11km @ 9%), Ancares via Pan do Zarco (12km @ 9,1%), Colle San Carlo (10,4km @ 10%), Ovronnaz from Leytron (11,6km @ 9,5%), Plateau des Saix (10km @ 9,1%) or the last 10km of Passo Giau south or Agnel east.

Now just imagine how brutal that will have been for the péloton of the 1966 Vuelta a Cuba. Most of those climbs above were still rarities or novelties at their time; San Carlo had been seen once (in 1962), but even long-time staples like Giau and Fedaia (FEDAIA!!!!!!!!) had yet to appear in the Giro, while even Alpe d’Huez had only been seen once and was at the time a somewhat forgotten summit. Things like Joux-Plane and Lagos de Covadonga were discoveries that were still miles away from arriving in elite races, so even if there were riders arriving in the Vuelta a Cuba with elite péloton experience in the west (which at that point there weren’t), this would still have been savage. With ramps supposedly reaching almost 30% on the 800m at 16% stretch in the middle - a veritable Cueña de los Cabres but over 30 years before it - and a couple of other kilometres jumping up past 10-11%, this ribbon of tarmac was feared before it was ever raced, and in the nascent race - it was only the third edition - it wasn’t really known who the climb would favour; especially because, due to the geography of Cuba, the climb would feature on stage 2 of the race, so before anybody was able to really get a handle on who was likely to be strong and in form. In the end it would be Manuel Sánchez, a relatively unassuming but lightweight domestique, who found that his legs were better able to withstand the punishing gradients than the others, and he won the inaugural climb to the Great Rock.

Sánchez’ time would be short, however; until the climbs he had never stood out as a finisher, largely because of being outmuscled on the flat and in the sprints, and his time gained on the climb was not enough to offset his losses in other stages, with Sérgio “Pipián” Martínez, the winner of the first Vuelta a Cuba, dethroning him before the race reached Havana. While he could take solace in the mountains prize, he wouldn’t have the chance to relive his triumph in future years as from 1967 onwards, the race saw an influx of foreign teams, usually Eastern Bloc squads competing for spots in later season goals like the Peace Race, who would travel to Cuba for some warm weather training and racing in February and, as Sánchez himself would recall, taught the Cubans how to race what we would now know as echelons, and brought many more concepts of racing unknown to the young scene of Cuba at the time.

Aldo Arencíbia leading the ascent to Gran Piedra in the Vuelta a Cuba during the 1970s, an era where the race was dominated by the battle between him and Carlos Cardet, each winning three Vueltas from 1972 to 1980

After sporadic appearances in the 1970s, eventually the parcours would become almost set in the Vuelta a Cuba, with only minor modifications, and the start of the race would always be a stage over La Farola from Baracoa to Guantánamo (with or without a preceding prologue) and then the next stage would be from Guantánamo to La Gran Piedra, more or less unipuerto, and around 114-115km in duration. Coming early in the race meant that it would have a good chance to be played for by the domestic riders, before the travelling Ostbloc champions acclimatised to Cuban conditions, having travelled from February weather in Eastern Europe, and popular local favourites like Aldo Arencíbia, nicknamed “Búfalo” long before José Enrique Gutiérrez, would also take the summit. The USSR’s greatest climber, Sergey Sukhoruchenkov, would win here in 1978, becoming the second overseas winner of the race after Henryk Kowalski in 1967, and would also be the best from the péloton a year later, but would be beaten by the breakaway.

With the advent of the 1980s, however, amateur cycling had a different, new power emerging in the mountains, and that was the Colombians. With the Colombian teams starting to head over to Europe to compete, and the Eastern Bloc teams coming to enter Venezuela’s nearby Vuelta al Táchira in the early season too, the Vuelta a Cuba became a race in the sights of the Colombian péloton, and 1981’s stage would be won by Segundo Chaparro, who would win the same stage in 1984 too and would later go on to a decade-long pro career and finish top 15 in the Dauphiné. 1983’s stage would see the Ostbloc fight back, with Olaf Jentzsch beating Jiří Škoda. Chaparro’s second stage win would follow a year later ahead of Ricardo Salazar of the home nation; Salazar would win the stage himself the following year after impressively dropping a young Piotr Ugrumov. After a couple of years of home winners (including most successful Vuelta a Cuba champion of all time Eduardo Alonso), Jentzsch would win here again in 1988, and then Alonso would win once more in 1989. Israel Torres would take a brilliant solo win in 1990, a minute up on the remainder of the field, to be the last champion of Gran Piedra for many years.

For a long time, though, that was it. The iconic climb was no more; the Vuelta a Cuba was no more. Even when the race returned, the world of cycling was very different. No Communist bloc of strong amateur riders to enter, and a very different calendar. La Gran Piedra was forgotten about, the idea of putting the main mountaintop finish on stage 2 of a two week race just didn’t fit with modern thoughts on the sport, with control of flat stages far greater than before, and the climb didn’t feature at all in the 2000-2010 run of the race. It was supposed to appear once, in 2004, and you will even see some reportage list it as a stage town, but the stage was changed to a flat finish in Santiago de Cuba, although you could probably have guessed just looking at the results sheet, with over 40 riders finishing on the same time as Pedro Pablo Pérez, and figure out that this stage did not finish on an 11km at 9% mountain. Not even the 2020 Tour stage 6 péloton could have managed that. However, that hasn’t been the end of the story.

After the death of the Vuelta a Cuba, as has been mentioned in previous write-ups, came the Gran Prémio Nacional de Cuba, or the Guantánamo - Havana Cycle Classic, essentially the same race but with a domestic only péloton and no prize money, and fulfilling the role of a national Tour without actually being one - I guess in the same manner as something like the HTV Cup in Vietnam or the Vuelta a la Independencia Nacional in the Dominican Republic, where it is instead of a national race, as opposed to the sponsor-name alternative Tours of a country like the Clásico RCN in Colombia, Rutas de América in Uruguay or Clásico Banfoandes in Venezuela which run as well as a national race. Building up slowly, the race decided to introduce the Gran Piedra climb in the 2015 edition, and it was a resounding success, seeing José Mojica win ahead of Yennier López, the two of them demolishing the rest of the field by three minutes with Monica dropping López with under 3km to go and setting a new record time for the traditional 114km route that had stood since 1984 (although improvements in bike technology over the 25 years since the stage was last held may well have been an impact on that). Commissaire Héctor Marcos insisted that the stage needed to be retained and run annually to assess the international potential of the Cuban domestic riders. Mojica, for his part, would return to the race the following year as national champion, and ride internationally with the Start team, a 13th in the Vuelta al Tachirá, 5th in the Volta do Rio Grande do Sul and 19th in the Vuelta a Costa Rica his most notable outside results. He would be beaten by 43-year-old Vicente Sanabria on La Gran Piedra, but take the lead soon after before winning on Topes de Collantes to take the GC once more.

However, despite Marcos’ enthusiasm, the climb would go back into disuse; the tarmac was in a bad state and it was impossible to run the stage in 2017. It came back in 2018 when Yasmani Balmaceda won, but since then it has been back on ice, with the road conditions having been deemed too poor for use in race conditions. The Guantánamo - La Habana Classic was replaced by the one-off Clásico Nacional de Ruta in 2019, but that replaced the Gran Piedra MTF with a much easier Puerto Boniato HTF/MTF on stage 2 instead, which Alejandro Parra won in what essentially amounted to a hilltop sprint. But all hope is not lost!

Yes, just three months ago, La Gran Piedra got a shiny new coat of asphalt, ready to make a new generation of cyclists wince and grimace. Let’s just hope we get to see it.

In the fictional universe in which these Race Design Thread races take place, however, this is the backdrop for what will probably be the final decisive moves of the race, and an iconic backdrop on which to set those battles.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 15: Santiago de Cuba - Santiago de Cuba, 112km

And so we come full circle with this, our final stage, a simple circuit race around the second largest city on the island, home to over half a million people and the economic and social hub of the eastern part of the island, making it the second most important city in the country as well. One of the oldest European settlements in the New World, this was the seventh village founded by Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, dating all the way back to 1515, although its initial history was rocky, the original settlement burning to the ground less than a year later and having to be rebuilt from scratch. Its position on the coast with the opportunity for calm anchorage along with the Sierra Maestra protecting it from inland incursions made it a valuable site, and it would be the base from which Hernán Cortes and Juan de Grijalba would sail to Mexico, and its importance for trading purposes made it a capital of Spanish Cuba, a title it held from 1522, when Baracoa was decided to be too isolated to continue in the role, to 1607, when the capital was moved to Havana - but it would also make it attractive to outsiders competing with the Spanish for holdings in the Caribbean and on the American continent, with the French plundering the city in the 1550s, and the British following suit twice, in 1603 and 1662. In addition to this the city was ravaged by fires several times, with considerable rebuilding required in 1526, 1535 and 1613.

Old colonial heart of Santiago de Cuba

Although the city was located around 5-6km inland in the Santiago Bay, these regular incursions by corsairs, privateers and pirates were enough of an issue for the local authorities to get Spain to sanction the construction of a large fort at the mouth of the bay to protect the city, the Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, informally known as the Castillo del Morro, a cliff-top fortification that has guarded the city since the 17th Century and has been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as one of the best preserved examples of Spanish-American colonial and military architecture in the world - standing firm and protecting the city against a further British incursion from Jamaica in 1741. It is now one of the city’s primary tourist attractions as not only is the fort interesting and scenic in its own right, but it also sits on a hilly outcrop that serves as the southern shoreline of Cuba, and affords wonderful vistas out across the bay and into the city from one side, and across the Caribbean coast and along the Sierra Maestra - for this purpose a luxury hotel complex called Balcón del Caribe has been constructed, offering precisely what its name suggests - an experience only dulled by the frequent appearance of aircraft, as this is directly under the flight path of the neighbouring Santiago de Cuba airport, owing to the lack of alternative flat terrain nearby.

The accessibility from the sea also contributed to rapid growth of Santiago de Cuba during periods of unrest in the Caribbean region, especially from the neighbouring French colony of Saint-Domingue, i.e. modern-day Haiti. This also created social havoc, with many freedmen of Afro-Caribbean origins now integrating into a Spanish colonial society that still allowed slavery, at the same time as the French were also held under great suspicion given the recent revolution that had taken place back in European France, and indeed French citizens were ordered out of Cuba following Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1809, but allowing the African-origin Saint-Dominicans to remain. They founded the tumba francesa, a specialised and specific genre of Afro-Cuban music and dance which is regionally popular, and the oldest troupes performing it have been around for over 150 years as parts of specialised societies set up in Santiago de Cuba to protect the culture of these French Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the island; this history also likely explains the large following of syncretic religions like santería and vodún in the city and its surroundings. Following the industrial revolution, the city became a gas-producing one but is also the home of the Bacardi brand, the world famous spirit distillers having been established in 1862, with the original distillery now being repurposed as an art gallery.

Santiago de Cuba has also been closely tied to insurrection and rebellion on the island of Cuba; both the social and economic melting pot that trading ports often create, and the position as the economic hub of Oriente, where the presence of the Spanish forces and elites was lower and the majority of the dissatisfaction with colonial powers resided, meant that it would frequently become the urban axis around which dissidence and opposition would rotate in Cuba; it was the hometown of independence fighter António Maceo, second in command in the Cuban Army of Independence and one of the most prominent and revered guerrilla combatants of the 19th Century, who had opposed the Paz de Zanjón and was killed in action during the Cuban War of Independence. The city also found fame early in the Ten Years’ War for the Virginius Affair, when during the midst of the conflict, a US-registered ship manned by Americans and British mercenaries under the command of Cuban insurrectionists was captured by the Spanish, sparking a diplomatic incident when 53 of the crew were executed as pirates, resulting in diplomatic settlements between Spain, Great Britain and the USA in order to avoid a costly war. The US had until that point maintained an uneasy peace with Spain by not recognising or acknowledging the Cuban rebels, however as many were based in exile in the US, especially in Florida, the Spanish viewed the American stance with suspicion; war bonds were being sold independently in America to support the Cuban insurrection, and with money raised through this, Manuel de Quesada commissioned John F. Patterson to purchase the ship in question; it had been running back and forth in aid of the Cuban rebellion under the mercenary command of a former Confederate Navy commodore for three years by the time the Spaniards were able to capture it.

Although war was able to be averted, the aftermath of the Virginius Affair would last for a long time, not least because this prompted the US to realise that they were ill-equipped for naval warfare with the Spanish and accelerate a reconstruction and reform program to ensure they could mount adequate battle should further incidents spark conflict. In fact, this arguably runs to the present day, as when during the next Cuban War of Independence, a US armoured cruiser sent to protect US interests in the area exploded and sank in harbour at Havana (the causes of which are debated to this day), America, now far better equipped for such conflict, declared war on Spain, fuelled by patriotic fervour and sensationalist press - President William McKinley had been trying to avoid conflict, so the mysterious sinking has attracted conspiracy theories, with many believing it was actually sunk by the rebels in order to encourage active US participation in their cause. After defeat in the Battle of San Juan Hill in July 1898, US General William Rufus Shafter laid siege to Santiago de Cuba - poorly defended from the land side, the city quickly surrendered and proved one of the major turning points of the Spanish-American War, consequences of which included the handover from Spain to the USA of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. With Puerto Rico still a US possession to this day, the consequences of the Virginius Affair, albeit indirectly, persist to this day.

Monuments and memorials at San Juan Hill

The association of Santiago de Cuba with dissidence doesn’t end there, though. Although originally from Havana and largely raised in Valencia back on the Spanish mainland, the great forefather of Cuban independence, poet and writer of the national awakening and martyr to the cause of the Cuban nation José Martí is buried here, after his remains were taken from the battlegrounds of Dos Ríos where they were originally buried and paraded to Santiago once the Spanish forces became aware of the magnitude of their bounty. Santiago is also the hometown of the revolutionary Frank País (sometimes known by the slightly erroneous “Paris”), who was one of the participants in the attack on the Moncada Barracks and later founded Acción Nacional Revolucionaria, an informal revolutionary group that consisted of many small cells set up in urban areas around the country under País’ overall direction, largely comprising teenagers and young adults from students and workers, organising labor unions and publishing uncensored news cribbed from local knowledge around the island and pirated overseas bulletins and broadcasts. ANR would merge with M-26-7 when Castro was released from jail, and País would become instrumental as the coordinator of urban efforts, creating distraction and procuring resources for the more active guerrillas fighting in the mountains. He would successfully radicalise almost the whole city in Santiago de Cuba, as after instructing each of his cells to paint the name of the movement on neighbouring buildings, almost the whole city was daubed in graffiti reading “M-26-7”. He also directed several days’ unrest in Santiago de Cuba that created distractions allowing some of the most significant guerrilla actions to be carried out elsewhere in the Oriente region. However, being located in a major urban centre made it harder for him to hide, and after being betrayed by an informant, he was captured trying to reach a getaway car and shot by police on July 30, 1957. He was just 22 years old.

The death of País created a significant uproar, and brought the city of Santiago out in mass protest, and the spontaneous uprising that followed the wake of this news being broadcast is one of the most decisive points of the Revolution. In fact, he was even allowed to be buried - despite clear governmental orders to the contrary - wearing the M-26-7 uniform; the anniversary of his death is commemorated as the Day of the Martyrs of the Revolution, and his remains have since been interred in the Santa Ilfigenia cemetery alongside other national figures like José Martí. Curiously, though, he remains a popular figure on all sides of debate in Cuba; Raúl Castro named his guerrilla unit after País, and the international airport of Holguín bears his name while his childhood home has been turned into a museum and revolutionary monument; on the other hand, one of the protest movements in Cuba, M-30-11, also bears his name; this movement largely consists of people (and their descendants) who had been members of M-26-7 and fought against Batista but who were either never Communists or who had grown disillusioned by the direction or the actions of Castro’s regime in the name of Communism, and who have named their movement using the same nomenclature standard as Castro, but honouring the death of País as a somewhat un-spoiled figure of the revolution; as they say, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. We at least know a bit about what Camilo Cienfuegos would have wanted to see happen in the aftermath of the revolution, but Frank País never made it that far. As such, he remains “pure” to all sides; as a revolutionary who died to give the country its better life to the pro-governmental side; and as a revolutionary who never sold his people out or compromised his beliefs to the protest movements. To this day he is often commemorated as the “most valiant” of the insurgents. On January 1st, 1959, it was from the balcony of the city hall of Santiago de Cuba that Fidel Castro proclaimed the success of the revolution,

Frank País

The city’s association with rebellion didn’t end with the Revolution, however, as to this day prominent dissidents against the Cuban regime call Santiago de Cuba home, such as Anyer Blanco, one of Cuba’s few Twitter posters and an anti-regime voice of some repute who has also supported and helped serve protest movements abroad, most notably in Venezuela. More commonly, nowadays, however, celebrity sons and daughters of the city are likely to come from the sports and entertainment worlds, with prominent figures in the arts including 19th Century icon José María Heredia, the prominent Afro-Cuban actress and performance poet Eusebia Cosme, and a number of singers and musicians, especially in the son genre which is based around the city. This includes the historic and world-renowned Trío Matamoros, singers and composers in the son and bolero genres whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Sindo Garay, a founder of the trova genre who lived to be over 100 and even contributed to the Cuban War of Independence, being one of few men to have attested shaking hands with both José Martí and Fidel Castro as a result; also many veteran members of the Cuban music scene who found international fame via Wim Wenders, Ry Cooder, Afro-Cuban All Stars and the Buena Vista Social Club film and album, have been based around Santiago de Cuba; Compay Segundo, once of the Los Compadres group, and who I mentioned in the Moa to Holguín stage due to the place names immortalised in his song “Chan Chan”, the best-known song of the Buena Vista Social Club project, who has sung for Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro and is interred in the same cemetery as Martí and País; Ibrahim Ferrer, who was born in a dance club in San Luís, just outside the city, and was the leader of Los Bocucos for over 30 years before retiring in 1991 only to be coaxed back by Nick Gold and Ry Cooder for what would become his most famous work; and Eliades Ochoa, one of the youngest participants in the BVSC and who remains active to this day, at the age of 78.

Music has also been a part of the history of other natives of the city beyond the confines of Cuba; Bob Marley’s wife Rita was also born in Santiago de Cuba before moving to Jamaica in her childhood, as was Emilio Estefán, a Cuban expat in Florida who helped found and for many years performed with the Miami Sound Machine - while you may not be familiar with his name, you will probably recognise that of his wife Gloria. The city is also the original home of the musician Marco Rizo and the actor Desi Arnaz, who would both find fame in America thanks to the sitcom I Love Lucy, with Arnaz, a former bandleader, enlisting former bandmate - and prominent concert pianist - Rizo to provide the musical arrangements for the show, as Arnaz would be busy co-starring in it, acting as the fictitious Ricky Ricardo, a singer and bandleader who served as husband and foil to the titular Lucy, played of course by Lucille Ball - Arnaz’ real-life wife.

This mix of national and international successes extends to the sporting prowess of the city; the most renowned would probably be 1970s athlete Alberto “El Caballo” Juantorena, a former basketballer who was one of the best runners in the world through the middle of that decade, being the only man to have won Olympic gold at both 400m and 800m, winning both - including setting a World Record in the latter - at Montreal 1976. He ranked #1 in the world at the 400m in 1974 and then every year from 1976 to 1978; he only took up the 800m shortly before that Olympic title, but won the World Cup ranking in both events in 1977 and also won the 800m in a new world record at the Universiade that year. However, persistent injuries to his feet - he had already required surgery in 1975, which is why he was unable to maintain his undefeated streak from the previous two seasons over 400m - prevented him from adding to his tally in Moscow, and then the boycott of the 1984 LA Games effectively meant that the Friendship Games were his swansong. Another Olympian is the boxer Yordenis Ugas, who won a bronze in Beijing to go with a World Championships gold before turning pro and scoring wins over the likes of Manny Pacquiao. Beyond Cuba, however, more people are likely to be familiar with Charles Rudy Ashenoff (born Carlos Espada), better known as the hulking Konnan, a Cuban-born professional wrestler whose mother brought him to the US in childhood and gave him an Anglicised name based upon that of her new partner, who fell into wrestling almost by accident; he was sent into the US Navy as a punishment for juvenile delinquency and posted to San Diego, from whence he broke into wrestling in Tijuana and became a massive star in Mexico; however for international audiences he is probably best known for his run in WCW in the mid to late 90s, being part of the nWo and also being considered largely responsible for the introduction of many of the Mexican luchadores that were a staple of WCW’s undercard to the American audience; however, wrestling’s tendency to over-rely on stereotypes and pigeonholing of athletes, especially given he broke into the business in Mexico means that Ashenoff is frequently mistakenly considered a Mexican even though in his early career he would frequently carry a Cuban flag to the ring.

Modern Santiago de Cuba cityscape

As the second largest city in the country it will no doubt not surprise you to learn that it has been a regular host of the Vuelta a Cuba, although not infrequently it would actually only be a stage start, owing to the proximity to Gran Piedra when that was hosting MTFs. However, sometimes, following the Gran Piedra stage, the following day’s race would be a loop stage starting and finishing in Santiago de Cuba, or sometimes even a crit or circuit race in the city. Winners here include Andrey Vedernikov, a Soviet rouleur who rode in service of Ivan Ivanov in the Ostbloc attempts at the Vuelta in the 80s; Andreas Petermann, a former winner of the DDR’s biggest one-day race, Berlin-Cottbus-Berlin and 2nd in the Peace Race in 1979; Sergey Uslamin, who would go on to race several GTs across the early 90s; and since the rebirth of the race in the early 2000s, veteran German sprinter Robert Förster, Cuban longtime stalwarts Pedro Pablo Pérez and Arnold Alcolea, longtime Diquigiovanni/Androni Giocattoli climber Jackson Rodríguez, Slovene all-rounder Jure Kocjan, who spent much of his career either in Balkan or US cycling but had a cup of coffee at the World Tour level when Euskaltel signed him in their pursuit of points for 2013, and long-time Colombian domestic sprint specialist Jaime Castañeda (who has more recently cropped up in the US scene) are among those to raise their arms in Santiago de Cuba.

My stage is a short one, consisting of four laps of a circuit of approximately 28km in length which doesn’t feature any categorised climbs, but nevertheless isn’t a straightforward flat stage, at least not after two weeks of racing and the resultant attrition. I’d describe it as rolling; there is nothing that is long enough to be a categorisation-worthy climb at a gradient steep enough to make a difference, and the longest sustained stretch of uphill, up to the Versalles suburb, is 1100m but only averaging 4%. It’s also very early in the circuit; we start and finish at the Distrito Abel Santamaría, between the park and the Museo de Historia 26 de Julio. This is to enable there to be plenty of space, but the first part of the circuit will see us travel through the old colonial casco viejo, past Parque Cespedes and the old centre.

Start/finish area

Parque Cespedes in the casco viejo

After the uphill drag up to Versalles, we have a twisty, technical section around the Mirador del Caribe and the Castillo del Morro, before we snake around the coastline at the mouth of the Bay of Santiago, including 500m at 5% and then a descent, then a very short ramp of 200m at 9% up on a small outcrop at Punta Gorda, and then 800m at 4,5% up above the coast before sweeping with some curves back down into the city, where we follow along the coast road and then sweep around the north of the city. The last corner is around a 120º right-hander at 1300m from the line, but it’s a wide open corner between two four-lane roads, so can be negotiated safely; then there’s a long straight with a slight left-hand kink and a final uphill 700m at 4,0% which should give plenty of chance for a nice safe sprint and also be slightly different than a pure drag race. It should be a sprint stage, but there are options to do something with it if the GC is close and somebody wants to give it a try.

So this was my Vuelta a Cuba - three MTFs, one inconsistent but changing in gradient, one short but super-steep, and one long and classic in style. An ITT, a TTT. Several hilly stages, doing almost everything I possibly could with the island to shake it up. And only two or three sprints. After all, the Vuelta a Cuba in its rebirth era from 2000 to 2010 was all about those, but the island offers so much more. You just have to work to find it, and I hope that I’ve been able to prove that.

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Time for my next design. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years making and throwing out designs(looking at my five unfinished Giro projects) and just not liking the end result to them(A Tour de Suisse that didn’t feel right). So, I took a break from race making, as there was no inspiration at all.

A couple months ago, I started going back into Cronoescalada and kept finding myself making races close to home. Having a lot of untapped potential and some brutal climbs, New England seemed ample for me to jump back in.

Cycling in the modern day here largely consists of mountain biking and cyclocross up on the mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, with the exception of the Tour of Somerville(more on that with our last stage)

Personally, I have little interest in mountain biking and cyclocross, so I wanted to create a proposal for a new stage race. Originally, I wanted to have a 9 day stage race like the Tour de Suisse, but found I left too much out for me to be satisfied with the result. With an area not a big amount smaller than the UK, one week did not do justice for the region .



So I present to you: The JumboVismaFan’s Tour de New England
This stage race would very likely be in mid-September or mid-October, as that is before ski season and is relatively dry compared to the spring.
4 MTF’s
1 HTF
3 Medium Mountain
2 ITT’s
2 Hilly
3 Sprint finishes

Stage 1-Narragansett Town Beach to Narragansett Town Beach, 11.9km

We start with the first of our two individual time trials in this race, on the shore of Rhode Island. 12k’s, pan flat, and it is an out and back on the same road. Not too much to stay about the race profile.


Narragansett’s town population doubles in the summertime months, which is thanks to the appeal of the beaches of Scarborough and Narragansett Town. Both are prized for their position to receive favorable southwardly swells off the Atlantic Ocean.

(Narragansett Beach and Pier)


The winner of this one surely should take a swim in the water after, a celebratory measure after a gritty ride along Ocean Rd.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Personally, I have little interest in mountain biking and cyclocross, so I wanted to create a proposal for a new stage race. Originally, I wanted to have a 9 day stage race like the Tour de Suisse, but found I left too much out for me to be satisfied with the result. With an area not a big amount smaller than the UK, one week did not do justice for the region .

This is always my big problem with areas where there aren't extant races or where the terrain isn't limiting: cramming everything I want into a single week.

However, your idea ties in with an idea I had a while back, which was that rather than trying to establish a single state race and build that to GT kind of level (because a race that only tours part of a country doesn't really feel like a Grand Tour equivalent, but a country like the USA is far too big to satisfactorily tour the entire country in just three weeks), there could be a two-week intermediate point between the likes of Avenir and the Baby Giro and the GTs, that would be like the Tour de France of the universe of the North American péloton but also have WT and PT teams sending their younger and developing GC riders. The idea would be to be the "Great American Road Race" and it would tour a rotating cast of regions rather than a single state or similar, so one year it could be New England and the East, another year it could be the south using the mountains of Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas, one year it could be in the North West around Idaho, Washington and Oregon, one year it could be through Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. The problem would then be that it would become harder to establish the lore if you only used a particular mountain range or area every few years.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I still haven't posted the last stage of my Fraustro Tour, because I kept being unsatisfied with its design. Then LS started posting her Cuban excursion, and I never got around to finish my race. But it will happen one day.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

I still haven't posted the last stage of my Fraustro Tour, because I kept being unsatisfied with its design. Then LS started posting her Cuban excursion, and I never got around to finish my race. But it will happen one day.

I know that feel. So many times I've got a race I'm happy with and halfway through posting it I suddenly get the urge to change one of the stages or I discover something and suddenly a whole bunch of rewriting is necessary.

 

[Netserk]

This is always my big problem with areas where there aren't extant races or where the terrain isn't limiting: cramming everything I want into a single week.

Another option is to design multiple editions (you are at what now, 11 Vuelta editions?).

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Another option is to design multiple editions (you are at what now, 11 Vuelta editions?).

11 posted editions. There are at least 2 more that have been completed but require some revisions, plus a few abandoned versions where stages or stage ideas have been cannibalised into later routes.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I know that feel. So many times I've got a race I'm happy with and halfway through posting it I suddenly get the urge to change one of the stages or I discover something and suddenly a whole bunch of rewriting is necessary.

In this case, it didn't have that much to do with the write-up, as I've tried to keep them fairly brief for this race, apart from my summary of Cavellar's life and career. I did however end up including too many sketchy roads I wasn't fully sure about the quality of, and a lot of the stage would also take place in Germany. Right now I'm considering abandoning the original finish and going for a different kind of a stage than originally intended.

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Tour of New England, Stage 2- Foxwoods Resort Casino to Goshen(CT), 223km

Leaving Rhode Island, we journey west and start our day at the Foxwoods Casino. One of two Tribal owned casino locations in Southeastern Connecticut, it has evolved to include go karting, ziplining, brand name shopping outlets, and a new massive indoor waterpark set to be completed in June of 2025.

(Foxwoods Resort and Casino)

Leaving out the casino, we continue in a northwesterly fashion for the next 40 kilometers until we reach the town of Willimantic for the intermediate sprint.

(Willimantic ~1950’s)

Willimantic is one of many towns in New England that was founded and flourished due to the presence of the textile industry. Remnants of the era still remain with a museum detailing the history of the 19th century in Willimantic and Victorian houses dotting the Prospect Hill neighborhood.



Leaving Willimantic, we venture more in a direct west direction, reaching our first KOM Sprint of the race, Blackledge Falls.

As with many hill sprints of this race, I had to take inspiration from the nearby area to name the KOM, and since the parking lot for the hike to Blackledge Falls was at the crest, the name was born

(Blackledge Falls)

Continuing on, at KM 80, the race undergoes a roughly 70km horseshoe pattern to avoid Hartford, the state capital, and the traffic crapshow to get in and out of there.

(Hartford Skyline)

Rejoining a relatively more “direct” route to the finish on kilometer 150 in Avon, the peloton also enters the hillier phase of the race as we adjourn onto US 44.

Our next KOM, North Canton, has no special naming to it, but is the first difficulty in about 100 kilometers.

(North Canton)

Continuing downhill, the peloton passes the most picturesque moment of the stage, the Barkhamsted Reservoir.

(Barkhamsted Reservoir “House” in fall)

We head back to US 44, and continue onwards until Winsted, where we head south onto CT Route 263 and our second KOM

Likewise to North Canton, Winchester has no special meaning, other than being a tougher climb than the last and coming with roughly 25 kilometers to go. While North Canton is roughly the same grade, Winchester continues the climb for roughly 2 more kilometers, with the race leaving CT Route 263 shortly after the KOM sprint.

(Winchester)

From here, the race dashes into Torrington, another one of the former mill towns of New England, but one of a more formidable size, sustaining twice the population of Willimantic.

Perhaps most famous of people to be born in Torrington, however, had nothing to do with textiles.

John Brown was born in 1800 here in Torrington. If you’re not a buff on American History, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard this name. To prevent myself from going on a long winded history lesson, I’ll just put the short notes on who he was.

(John Brown)
John Brown was born in the wrong era. He believed that all men were created equal, which he’s right, but was not widely accepted in the early 1800’s, especially in the American South where he eventually campaigned in. Brown participated in the Bloody Kansas campaign(decided if Kansas was a “slave” or “free state”) and incited murderous riots and rebellions on white slave owners. Brown met his end at Harper’s Ferry, where a slave rebellion led on a federal arsenal ended horribly as state and federal militias enclosed his group. John Brown was publicly hung and was allowed to move his final resting place to North Elba, New York, closer to his hometown of Torrington.

(Harper’s Ferry)

Anyways, back on the race, once we enter Torrington city limits we continue to head south until reaching North Elm Street, where we head west onto our final climb of the day.

A theme of the last few KOM’s, no originality was had in deciding the name for this climb. Route 4 was the simplest, so it stayed. However, this climb of roughly 2k’s at 5% with pitches up to 10% will cause some commotion in the peloton and have a ending to a race not too dissimilar to Longwy in 2022.

(Part of Route 4 on route to Goshen)
After the climb tops out with roughly 5k’s to go, it doesn’t go completely downhill. Rather, the remaining of the race, it’s rather flat with a small rise about halfway between the sprint and finish line.

As you can see here the last couple k’s has a sharp bend to the left and a right angle turn very close to the finish line but not one too dangerous for it to be very problematic.

The race finishes right in front of the Goshen Fairgrounds, home to one of the more popular Connecticut fairs on Labor Day Weekend and provide a worthy backdrop to a stage that can bring some surprises, right before the second-toughest challenge tomorrow.

(Goshen Fairgrounds)

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Stage 3 of the Tour of New England: Windsor Locks(CT) to Mount Acustney(VT), 213.6km

Today’s journey along the Connecticut River will culminate in a first true test to see who’s up to snuff for this race.

We begin in Windsor Locks, eastward of yesterday’s finale. Windsor Locks is most notable for housing the biggest airport in Connecticut, Bradley International Airport.

(Bradley International)

We head north for the duration for the stage, with few exceptions of heading far from the Connecticut River. One of the two exceptions is heading west to avoid downtown Springfield Massachusetts and head through West Springfield, Westfield, and Holyoke.


The race passes through downtown Holyoke, which is most well known for its Irish Heritage and subsequent St Patrick’s Day Weekend celebrations. Over 400,000 spectators line the streets of Holyoke on “parade day” to celebrate the cultural backbone Holyoke was founded upon.

(Holyoke Parade Festivities 2023)

Out of Holyoke, we head into South Hadley, and on the road out of South Hadley is where our first KOM point of the day will be contested, at the Notch overlook trailhead.

(Top of the Notch trailhead looking eastward)

Past the Notch, the race continues due north, bypassing the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and eventually meets up with US Route 5 in Bernardston on the border of Vermont and Massachusetts at kilometer 109.


The race enters a false flat, which the bottom of it consists of our intermediate sprint in Brattleboro.


Brattleboro is likewise another town that has seen economic decline in the past 100 years or so, but not because of textiles. Brattleboro was home to many large bookbinding companies and one of the largest pipe organ manufacturers in the world. When those industries went by the wayside, so did Brattleboro on a global economic scale, however it still is important for trade for the rest of Vermont due to its position on the Connecticut River and key cargo train tracks.

(Brattleboro)

Continuing on US 5, in the town of Putney, we reach our second KOM sprint, aptly named “US 5 Putney”.

(Putney)
The race enters its flattest portion of the race, all the way to the foot of the brutal Mount Acustney.

Just by the profile you can tell it’s a brute of a climb. Of the climb proper, the 5.6 kilometers averages a gradient of 12.2%, and has extended stretches of over 15%. The second toughest climb of the race(if you know anything about bike climbs in the United States you know what’s the toughest) should prove worthy of being a key decider of the general classification.

(View from Interstate 91 Northbound of Mount Acustney)

 

[firefly3323]

Stage 3 of the Tour of New England: Windsor Locks(CT) to Mount Acustney(VT), 213.6km

Today’s journey along the Connecticut River will culminate in a first true test to see who’s up to snuff for this race.

We begin in Windsor Locks, eastward of yesterday’s finale. Windsor Locks is most notable for housing the biggest airport in Connec

Being from New England myself I have often thought about a 'ToNE' and what it would be. I love that you are doing this, you're more motivated than me LOL.

One critique; you're not going to utilize Mt Greylock? Best climb in MA and Melville's inspiration for the Great White Whale! Or am I jumping the gun and you will come back to it?

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Being from New England myself I have often thought about a 'ToNE' and what it would be. I love that you are doing this, you're more motivated than me LOL.

One critique; you're not going to utilize Mt Greylock? Best climb in MA and Melville's inspiration for the Great White Whale! Or am I jumping the gun and you will come back to it?

With this race, my biggest disappointment was the lack of Massachusetts Berkshire climbs, and that was necessary to incorporate the best areas of Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire for climbing. The ending of this race was up in the air, and a Greylock finish got axed for what I ended up doing. As a native of Western Mass, personally was a little disappointment but the entertainment wouldn’t have nearly been as high in that form of the race.

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Stage 4 of the Tour of New England: White River Junction to Killington Resort, 182.6km

My personal favorite stage of this race, this medium mountain test should be to the delight of riders willing to expand or make up times in the General Classification.

We start our race in White River Junction, a community in Hartford VT most prominent for its intersection between Vermont’s only interstates, 91 and 89.

(White River Junction)
From there, we head south on previously ridden roads, even passing by the road to Mount Ascutney where the race presumably blew up yesterday.

In the town of Weathersfield, we turn west onto Vermont Route 131, and head towards the intermediate sprint at Okemo Resort.

The resort at Okemo is one of the biggest ski stations in Vermont, and has much better beginner slopes than the other top ski stations in the state.

Further past Okemo, the road starts to shift to the north, reaching Rutland, a turning point in the race and signaling the business end of the race is coming soon.

Heading onto US 4, we have our first KOM of the day, the climb up to Pico Mountain Rssort which brings us into Killington. At 11km’s at roughly 3%, this should be little more than a warm up for the days final festivities.


Past the Pico Mountain resort, we join the loops the race will complete 3.5 times before reaching the finish line at Killington.

The main obstacle on this course is most certainly the 4 kilometer 7% pitch of asphalt to be completed 3 times before the finish line, the last of which comes with just 3 kilometers to the line, and not too much valley time to see attacks be insignificant before the last climb(however all descents + valleys are on highway standard road)

(climb of East Mountain Road)

(Killington Mountain)

Killington mountain itself may not need any introduction to those of you who follow alpine skiing, as “The Beast of the East” is a regular fixture on the FIS World Cup schedule. Killington Ski Resort is the largest one on the East coast, and features runs from beginner to challenging for experienced skiers.

As for the cycling, aside from this stage, Killington would also be my preferred host if you were to run a world championships in New England. You have a robust house rental market for teams to stay at(there are dozens of houses that can easily house 30 guests-I’ve stayed in one)enough resorts in Killington and Rutland to house any tourists and media, which has been proven by their capability to produce successful ski seasons year after year.

(Killington Mountain Slopes for World Cup Competition)

For the terrain you can incorporate East Mountain Road if you want a more selective race, or go up the main road to Killington Resort and down East Mountain Road if you want it hilly but not too selective.

Anyways, for this race, the climb of E Mountain Road 3x should hopefully see someone spring action on the GC before tomorrow’s hill descent finish.

(A Final Look of Killington Mountain)

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Stage 5: Killington Resort to Sugarbush Resort, 170km

Unfortunately, during the weekdays, I now have significantly less time for higher quality write ups like the write ups before. So for today and tomorrow, I don’t expect the write ups to contain too much quality. However, on weekends like the one upcoming I have time to deliver better reading experiences to you forum viewers.


Todays stage is rather open, with three very solid climbs, the last of which summiting with 8.5k’s to the line(that does contain its steepest part at the end of the climb) before a short kicker topping out at 3k’s to the line offers a fun stage before the two most straightforward finishes of this race.

(Lincoln Gap Road)

(Appalachian Gap Road)

(Sugarbush Resort)

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Stage 6: Middlebury to Stowe, 184km

Today’s stage is the first straightaway sprint, or at least it should be. Mount Mansfield Gap does feature almost a kilometer at 12% at its top, but from the summit there is 55 km of valley descent and flat. The sprinters should have their time in the spotlight, that is if they made the trek overseas in the first place.

(Mount Mansfield Gap)

(Stowe Vermont)

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Stage 7, St Johnsbury(VT) to Lancaster(NH), 46km

The original plan for this stage was it to be as pan flat as possible(according to cronoescolada, this stage only has 40 meters of elevation less than my original design). However, in this grand tour of New England, a boring pan flat stage is not what the people deserve. So, instead, I drew out an ITT directly connecting the two towns across state lines, and in between added a cool Northern New England staple: a covered wooden bridge. With the second ITT taking place on stage 7 instead of stage 15(the original plan), I will indeed have to change the ending of the stage race and may recant some previous words I said to @firefly3323 in this thread. For now, this should be a deserving start to the 3 most important GC stages of this race, and next up is possibly one of the toughest climbs to grace the American roadways.

(Mount Orne Covered Bridge)

(Lancaster NH)

 

[E_F_]

https://www.cyclist.co.uk/in-depth/three-week-tour-of-britain

 

[Libertine Seguros]

It's always interesting to look at what there is there, the problem as ever is one of accessibility. Sadly for Britain the climbs that would be of the most interest are not of the scale to be more than medium mountain, save for a couple, and then you'd fall into the same pitfall as races like the Volta a Portugal where it's always the same mountains every year. Not only that, but ones like Bealach na Ba are in the middle of nowhere, with very little by way of alternative routes for traffic for fans to get there. Britain is nevertheless one of a few places where a one-week race can't really be enough (notwithstanding the issues with parcours currently, where a week most definitely IS enough), but a three-week race simply couldn't offer enough variety year on year to be viable long-term, as they would have to rely extremely heavily on the same few climbs; unfortunately climate does not allow for the same development of the skiing industry in Britain to enable the range of established infrastructure at mountaintops or at high enough altitude for there to be sufficient variety in summit finishes.

The three week nature of the Grand Tours is a product of the countries they take place in, and it's hard to see too many options for other countries that could viably host a genuine fourth GT without fundamentally changing the formula for what we have grown to accept as the characteristics of a Grand Tour; touring only part of a country doesn't feel big enough in scope (even if, as with places like California, that part of a country is as big as the existing GT hosts), but many countries are simply too big to feel like you've actually toured them in three weeks (which works against e.g. a Tour of the USA, Tour of China, Tour of Australia), while others are too small to offer sufficient variety even if they have the terrain for it (which works against e.g. a three week Tour de Suisse). Places with sufficient geographic diversity to ape the kind of routes we get from the Grand Tours also need to have the accessibility and the roads that achieve this (Germany and Britain struggle from too much of their mountains being medium-sized and not enough high passes; Morocco suffers from too few nodal routes in the mountain ranges and most of them being at very low gradient). 12 to 14 stages over two weeks, like the old Milk Race, is the perfect length for a Tour of Britain I feel, long enough to let the whole of the country be explored and satisfactorily say you've toured the country, but short enough that you can mix it up year on year.

Also like when there was that post about the fan who designed their own women's GT of Britain on the CN homepage, another problem is - and one that I'm extremely guilty of myself - going too far in the direction of what the country as a whole has to offer and not enough to who is currently ponying up the funds; the East of England is all too easily to leave out of British fantasy routes because it offers so little to work with, but it's also the most cycling-supportive region in the country, similar to how I don't really pay enough mind to the northwestern part of the meseta in my Vuelta designs or areas like the Vendée in my Tour designs, but both are major hubs of cycling in their respective countries and would invariably be included even though they would add little to the race from a spectacle point of view unfortunately.

For me, the perfect race for Britain would be the Classics man's stage race par excellence with a medium-sized MTF or two and a TT or two thrown in, 12-14 days utilising some of the tricky circuits like the Glasgow Worlds route, some of the cobbles of West Yorkshire or the Lincoln GP circuit, Ardennes-alike short steep climbs around places like the Peak District and the Lake District, a Flèche Wallonne-type finish or two (Sutton Bank perhaps, or similar to the Great Orme stage in the linked route) and some medium mountains in Wales and Scotland. It would make it something akin to the old Peace Race parcours-wise, covering the gamut of parcours styles of the Classics. I genuinely love the idea of countering the decline of cycling races in the UK by going for the balls-to-the-wall "not only are we not going to shrink our one remaining race, we're going to GROW it and gamble on it galvanising the interest!" approach, and it's sad that after the initial boom of cycling through the 2010s, the scene is back to the doldrums of pre-Sky British domestic cycling with a lot of bonus second fiesta races and all the young talent going overseas to get noticed (although there is a LOT more of it going overseas and getting noticed now than there was in those days), but while I think a one-off three week race in the UK could work in theory, in the long term it would benefit more from an intermediate, two week type approach imo.

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Sorry about the lack of posts continuing my race, really been busy recently so likely only weekend posts, so stage 8 should be written up and posted Saturday morning-ish EST.

 

[Jumbo Visma Fan :)]

Stage 8, Conway to Mount Washington, 152km

(Due to some weird routing issue, it wouldn’t allow me to connect Mount Washington to the rest of the stage)

There’s no sugarcoating it; this stage is the most important one of the race. That is because of the 12km, 12%(!) climb of Mount Washington, the tallest mountain on the eastern seaboard.

We move south to Conway for the start of the next two stages. Today we move east to start with the difficulty of Hurricane Mountain Road, which we will visit later in this race again.

From the crest until the base of Mount Washington, we only encounter the intermediate sprint and a manageable cat 3 climb, however the road is lumpy all the way to the base.

Mount Washington should provide massive gaps amongst those high in the general classification. Unlike many climbs in Europe, the gradient is regular 11-13% all the way up the climb. If you hope for respite, you are out of luck. The victor at the top of the climb is definitely one to be deserved of his stage crown.

(Mount Washington)