Vuelta a España Vuelta a España 2025, Stage 2: Alba – Limone Piemonte (159.6k)

[Oldman]

Jonas came through today and his team did the necessary work. Kuss and the (much hated) Matteo are representing the JV power trio.
Lidl/Trek DS: "Guiulio! We are a team of solid sprinters! Which MFer told you to turn to look before crossing the F***ING FINISH LINE!!!"

 

[Cookster15]

Bernal's problem is the passing of the days. The last week is usually disappointing.

Bernal won the 2019 Tour de France in the last week - stages 19 (Col de l'Iseran) and 20 (Val Thorens) to be precise.

As I have mentioned before here I don't think Bernal was lucky because of the shortened stage which actually better suited JA. I think "usually" only applies to since Bernal has come back to racing after his big crash. I still hope Bernal can remind us why he was considered the next big thing before Pogacar and then Vingegaard arrived. Egan is still only 28 so time is on his side.

And I think it is a very good early sign for Bernal that he was able to finish on the same time as Vingegaard on today's stage. He is better suited to higher climbs.

 

[Peyroteo94]

Bernal won the 2019 Tour de France in the last week - stages 19 (Col de l'Iseran) and 20 (Val Thorens) to be precise.

As I have mentioned before here I don't think Bernal was lucky because of the shortened stage which actually better suited JA. I think "usually" only applies to since Bernal has come back to racing after his big crash. I still hope Bernal can remind us why he was considered the next big thing before Pogacar and then Vingegaard arrived. Egan is still only 28 so time is on his side.

And I think it is a very good early sign for Bernal that he was able to finish on the same time as Vingegaard on today's stage. He is better suited to higher climbs.

With all respect, only naive people thought Bernal would be the next big thing in cycling.
A guy who struggled to beat Pinot in the mountains and had/has a mediocre TT cannot be a dominant GT rider. For some reason, one year later he was getting beaten quite easily by Roglic.

 

[Oldman]

With all respect, only naive people thought Bernal would be the next big thing in cycling.
A guy who struggled to beat Pinot in the mountains and had/has a mediocre TT cannot be a dominant GT rider. For some reason, one year later he was getting beaten quite easily by Roglic.

He was still relatively young against Pinot and that hardly closed off his future to improvement. Cruel cycling accidents sealed the deal for years and, that he is in the picture against Vindegaard on a MTF says volumes about Jonas' strengths if your assessment of Egan is to be believed.

 

[Rob5091]

Naughty people playing around with their numbers -
https://cyclinguptodate.com/cycling...stage-2-joao-almeida-fined-for-unusual-reason

The following six riders have been fined due to 'modified identification number', having a 200CHF fine: João Almeida, Marcel Camprubi, Valentin Paret-Peintre, Magnus Sheffield, Lukas Nerurkar and Léo Bisiaux. Furthermore their DS have received 100CHF fine: Marco Marcato, Christian Knees, Julien Jurdie, Tom Steels, Alex Sans Vega and Juan Manuel Garate.

 

[logeardaddy]

Reaching for a gel, Axel Zingle popped his shoulder a second time (after the crash). He let a bystander hold his bike, but when he got out of the ambulance, the fellow had disappeared with it.

 

[Oldman]

Reaching for a gel, Axel Zingle popped his shoulder a second time (after the crash). He let a bystander hold his bike, but when he got out of the ambulance, the fellow had disappeared with it.

Talk about absolute bad, bad days. And he gets to wake up tomorrow morning with expectations of starting. He's gonna be in some serious pain.

 

[SafeBet]

Reaching for a gel, Axel Zingle popped his shoulder a second time (after the crash). He let a bystander hold his bike, but when he got out of the ambulance, the fellow had disappeared with it.

Story has been debunked by Visma. Bike was in the broom wagon.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1959839470041354376

View: https://x.com/Domestique___/status/1959839470041354376?t=96RSdEPQvxjTX3pwqUnSDw&s=19

 

[Samu Cuenca]

With all respect, only naive people thought Bernal would be the next big thing in cycling.
A guy who struggled to beat Pinot in the mountains and had/has a mediocre TT cannot be a dominant GT rider. For some reason, one year later he was getting beaten quite easily by Roglic.

I don't think you're right here, but call me naive if you want. Until his back problems began and later his big crash occurred, I definitely expected him to keep improving and therefore didn't see his somewhat unimpressive Tour victory as a sign that he was overrated. In 2019 he podiumed Lombardia, and apart from Nibali that was actually a quite rare feat for a current/former Tour winner at the time.

Sure his bad TT was always going to hurt him, like it did for Andy Schleck, but that wouldn't necessarily be a problem if he was the strongest climber, which it looked like he could possibly become. When the 2019 Tour finished, no one could really have predicted the Pogačar(/Vingegaard) era would already begin the next year, nor that it would reach the level of GT dominance it has. Hindsight is 20(/)20.

 

[Peyroteo94]

I don't think you're right here, but call me naive if you want. Until his back problems began and later his big crash occurred, I definitely expected him to keep improving and therefore didn't see his somewhat unimpressive Tour victory as a sign that he was overrated. In 2019 he podiumed Lombardia, and apart from Nibali that was actually a quite rare feat for a current/former Tour winner at the time.

Sure his bad TT was always going to hurt him, like it did for Andy Schleck, but that wouldn't necessarily be a problem if he was the strongest climber, which it looked like he could possibly become. When the 2019 Tour finished, no one could really have predicted the Pogačar(/Vingegaard) era would already begin the next year, nor that it would reach the level of GT dominance it has. Hindsight is 20(/)20.

Roglic was already better than Bernal and don't forget Froome crashed.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Roglic was already better than Bernal and don't forget Froome crashed.

But he was only 22 in 2019 and had not raced against Roglič as a leader in a GT. Also Roglič himself had not won a GT yet at the end of that Tour.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

Naughty people playing around with their numbers -
https://cyclinguptodate.com/cycling...stage-2-joao-almeida-fined-for-unusual-reason

Wait, what?

And more to the point, why?

 

[Devil's Elbow]

I don't think you're right here, but call me naive if you want. Until his back problems began and later his big crash occurred, I definitely expected him to keep improving and therefore didn't see his somewhat unimpressive Tour victory as a sign that he was overrated. In 2019 he podiumed Lombardia, and apart from Nibali that was actually a quite rare feat for a current/former Tour winner at the time.

Sure his bad TT was always going to hurt him, like it did for Andy Schleck, but that wouldn't necessarily be a problem if he was the strongest climber, which it looked like he could possibly become. When the 2019 Tour finished, no one could really have predicted the Pogačar(/Vingegaard) era would already begin the next year, nor that it would reach the level of GT dominance it has. Hindsight is 20(/)20.

And even in 2021, a week before his back problems destroyed his Tirreno bid, he finished third from the most stacked elite group in Strade ever, behind Van der Poel and Alaphilippe but in front of Van Aert, Pidcock and Pogacar. An injury-free Bernal would have been the third-best GC rider in the world and a top-5 rider for the climby classics right now, maybe even a little more than that if he'd had a Pogacar-esque big step up at 25 in him but at that point we're in pure speculation territory.

 

[Red Rick]

Bernal, much like Del Potro, manages to get his hypothetical levels overrated by getting injured. He was the weakest of the 3 GT winners in 2019 and outside of Oscar Pereiro the weakest Tour de France winner since I don't how how long.

And now we're back to overreacting to the kind of uphill sprint he has always been good at.

 

[Danskebjerge]

I liked this stage 2 finish a lot. Not often we see mountain sprints like that. It was interesting to see the teams playing a role.

Also, it's nice to see that we have so many relatively even GC riders in the line-up.

 

[Peyroteo94]

Bernal, much like Del Potro, manages to get his hypothetical levels overrated by getting injured. He was the weakest of the 3 GT winners in 2019 and outside of Oscar Pereiro the weakest Tour de France winner since I don't how how long.

And now we're back to overreacting to the kind of uphill sprint he has always been good at.

I don't agree on Del Potro but everything else is spot on. Bernal just had that horrible crash in 2022. 2020 and 2021 shown how far behind he was from both Roglic and Pogacar.

 

[tobydawq]

Bernal, much like Del Potro, manages to get his hypothetical levels overrated by getting injured. He was the weakest of the 3 GT winners in 2019 and outside of Oscar Pereiro the weakest Tour de France winner since I don't how how long.

And now we're back to overreacting to the kind of uphill sprint he has always been good at.

Dude, Del Potro was insane when fit.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I concede that his Tour win felt like it might have come a year too early, and of course I would very much have liked to have seen stage 19 raced in full. Still he had already helped a teammate win the Tour the year before and won the Tour de Suisse ahead of the Tour while being in his 22nd year, the same as Andy Schleck was when he podiumed the 2007 Giro.

 

[Cycling111]

Gaudu sprinter

 

[fenns]

Jonas is on his playstation - so much better than everyone else he can have fun trying to win stages like this knowing it's not going to impact his GC

 

[search]

He definitely did not try to take it easy today tho. He tried, he just wasn't good enough (which is completely normal)

Not that I have a problem with him trying today, why not. He's pretty punchy.

not that it really makes much of a difference, but as Ryan is among the few who writes a Vuelta diary: according to today's one, he tried to position Nerurkar & Quinn.

"Although Sunday’s second stage finished atop a second-category climb, it was a pretty gradual incline until the last couple of kilometres and even then the gradient was ‘only’ seven per cent. My job was to be there to help position my teammates Sean Quinn and Lukas Nerukar for the finish, but the speed was so high on the climb that things didn’t turn out the way we planned.

The shallower gradient meant a lot of the big powerful guys and sprint trains could get involved and it was more of a drag race than a finish suited to climbers. At one point we were doing 40kph on the climb and the average for the ascent was well over 30kph. I was up there with Lukas in the last kilometre or so but unfortunately both our bubbles popped there."

Archie Ryan’s Vuelta diary: ‘It was pure luck that I stayed up when around 20 guys slid out in front of me’

Tuesday, August 26, Grenoble Airport

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