The organisation embarrassed themselves with some awful course decisions. Then the péloton embarrassed themselves getting perfectly safe finishes neutralised only to place the finish somewhere more dangerous. Then there were some dreadful sprint finish plans that were probably only survived without worse accidents because the sprinting field was dreadful. The GC battle was neutralised pretty much until the end of week 1 except for the Javalambre stage, and the only really memorable things that we can take out of the whole thing were Remco crashing into the staffer after the line in Andorra and the GC men soft-pedalling their way in on stage 9 after the finish was moved halfway down the mountain and the ridiculous scene of Fernando Escartín hanging from a gate trying to take the times past a random spot on the road.
This all happened before the Jumbo show began. Once the Jumbo show began, it basically rendered everybody else entirely irrelevant. And then, as I've described many times already, the only possibility that remained for an actual race was between the teammates; and somehow they contrived to do something worse than provide no action: they gave us a little taste of action, then got scared of bad PR when it looked like the guy that the media wanted to win wouldn't, and took that action away, getting themselves into a catch 22 where they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't; they made it clear that Kuss wouldn't have won had they not imposed a ceasefire, but they also basically thereby ended the race four days early, leaving the rest of the race a miserable pseudo-neutralisation. The people that campaigned on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube etc. were happy to trade four days of racing (and would have been willing to trade more because they were upset about there being actual racing on Bejes and Angliru) for the feelgood moment at the end.
I can't vote higher than a zero for this, because even if the rider that benefitted from the popularity contest wasn't a rider I dislike so clearly, the way the race was settled is absolutely miserable and sets an awful precedent for the sport, both in terms of the one team dominating so easily that they could afford to hand out Grand Tour titles to their domestiques like consolation prizes, and in terms of the "we did it, Reddit!" way of the team allowing themselves to be pressured by PR into deciding who is and isn't allowed to win the race. And even before that, the fundamental organiser foul-ups and the péloton being able to dictate which parts of the course they would race on and which they wouldn't and the complete mess of those stages with the GC men riding in at tourist pace while racing was officially still on was just a complete farce.
From a racing point of view it was better than the Giro, but some of the things that have happened at this Vuelta have potential long-term repercussions that really concern me for the future of the sport.
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