This was the infamous "stolen Vuelta". The penultimate stage was a
medium mountain stage around the Sierra de Guadarrama, with around 40km from the rather middling Puerto del León to the finish at the DYC distilleries in Palazuelo de Eresma; expected to be a stage for the break with Robert Millar (apologies to deadname, but I think it's inevitable when discussing their active career) holding a slender lead from Pacho Rodríguez (who is Colombian for the record, but was on a Spanish team), and Pello Ruíz Cabestany just over a minute behind, but nobody else within five minutes. Noted baroudeur José Recio was in the breakaway when Pedro Delgado, 6th on GC, rode across to him from far out. Delgado was over 6 minutes down, and 5 minutes away from the podium, so little incentive to chase, and with only a flat stage to follow, it was thought as a rather hopeless hail mary. Except the gap kept growing, and kept growing until somehow Delgado was in the virtual lead and the GC guys had expended a lot of their domestiques, while Delgado had done the classic deal with Recio, offering the stage in exchange for collaboration, and they were working well together up front.
Turns out that the organisers had been putting false time gaps on the boards meaning that Millar and co. had not realised how far up the road Delgado actually was, until suddenly the chalkboard said Delgado was miles out in front, like he'd gained five minutes in no time at all, and Millar panicked. Having expended his own domestiques and having alienated many of his rivals with arrogant comments en route to the race lead, he asked around for support and got none, Pacho Rodríguez claimed to have said something along the lines of "who came 2nd last year, do you remember? That's why" when asked by Millar why he wasn't contributing to protect his 2nd place.
At the time, much of Spain was very much in favour of this; obviously Delgado was a more popular rider in Spain, and Millar had hardly been making many friends in the Spanish péloton or with the Spanish press. The Vuelta was also emerging from an era where they were too keenly aware of their status as the runt of the GT litter and had been all too easy for the overseas teams to bully, as they were often offering significant concessions around their preferred overseas stars, with examples such as when Ferdinand Bracke was given a time penalty for an illegal feed, so Peugeot threatened to withdraw their team from the race and a hapless commissaire was forced to pretend he wrote the wrong race number down, even though Bracke was pretty recognisable, wearing the race leader's jersey at the time, and the guy that eventually got the time penalty, a random Spanish domestique, was in a completely different group not being monitored by the same commissaire anyway. The Spanish teams would usually self-destruct through in-fighting or they would be busy squabbling amongst themselves and allow outsiders to triumph (indeed this was a large part of Éric Caritoux's victory the previous year), so as a result, after years of the foreign teams banding together and bullying the Vuelta's organisers into favourable circumstances, there was a fair bit of triumphalism about the way the Spanish teams and organisers had managed to come together for once to engineer a home success, which only served to exacerbate the controversy. The fact that Britain would then have to wait another 27 years for a Grand Tour winner (eventually reduced to 26, but obviously we didn't know that at the time) ensured the story stayed alive for decades.
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