Vingegaard, Almeida and a tale of two teams - Vuelta a España analysis

A tale of two teams at the Vuelta a España. Visma | Lease a Bike’s original game plan for stage 9 was a conservative one, but at the bottom of the climb to Valdezcaray, Jonas Vingegaard decided to call an audible. Something about the configuration of the race told him to be aggressive.

“We wanted to ride defensively; it was my instinct that changed the plan,” Vingegaard explained in his post-stage press conference. “I asked on the radio if a teammate could lead me out at the start of the climb.”

Matteo Jorgenson, inevitably, answered the call, but Sepp Kuss could also be seen scrambling to get into position. Regardless of form, the two Americans are consummate team men. Here, it was Jorgenson who streaked to the front, and he dutifully set a supersonic pace before Vingegaard jumped past him. Behind, the red jersey group fractured into shards. 

Vingegaard’s chief rival, João Almeida, had a hard time finding any UAE Team Emirates-XRG companions among those broken pieces. King of the mountains Jay Vine emerged to offer a brief turn on the front for his leader, but the rest of the squad’s climbing cohort – Marc Soler, Felix Grossschartner and Juan Ayuso – were pointedly missing in action.

Ayuso’s absence was the most striking, given his outrageous talent and his current form. He began this race as Almeida’s co-leader, after all, even if he later insisted that GC aspirations had been foisted upon him by an expectant Spanish media.

After losing all GC hopes at Pal on stage 6, Ayuso bounced back to win the summit finish at Cerler the following day. One would have expected him to parlay that performance into a role as a deluxe domestique for Almeida, but that certainly didn’t materialise at Valdezcaray. 

Ayuso sat up at the base of the climb, reaching the summit almost 22 minutes down. The most compelling telenovela in Spanish cycling is the gift that keeps on giving.

Once Vine swung off, Almeida pressed on without any further assistance, dropping podium contenders one by one until only Tom Pidcock (Q36.5) remained. A few kilometres from the summit, Almeida could be seen chiding the Briton for his failure to collaborate – “He told me to grow some balls,” Pidcock smilingly revealed afterwards – but it was hard to shake the sense that he was more frustrated with his own team.

Confirmation arrived when Almeida reached the summit in third place, 24 seconds down on the rampant Vingegaard. When asked about his exchange with Pidcock, Almeida promptly shifted the focus to his own squad. “I missed maybe a bit my teammates today,” Almeida said. “Nobody was with me in the end, but yeah, it is what it is.”

Almeida has been in this game long enough to understand the weight of those words, and he surely didn’t throw them lightly. But while Ayuso’s lack of impact will draw most of the attention, Soler and Grossschartner’s displays are also worth underlining.

Soler was nowhere to be seen when Vingegaard accelerated clear, but the Catalan still had the strength to help himself to sixth on the stage, finishing 1:46 down in the same group as men like Egan Bernal, Ben O’Connor and red jersey Torstein Træen. Grossshartner was only a little further behind.

By contrast, Vingegaard’s supporting cast was reportedly still doing his bidding long after he had soared away up the mountain. Træen did enough to save his red jersey from Vingegaard by 37 seconds, and he reckoned afterwards that Visma had been more than glad for him to keep it. 

Indeed, the Norwegian went so far as to reveal that two of Vingegaard’s teammates – presumably Jorgenson and Kuss, though Ben Tulett was also on the scene – had paced him on the climb with a view to helping him stay in the maillot rojo. “It felt a bit like maybe they didn’t want Jonas to have the jersey yet,” Træen said.

The disparity in support received by Vingegaard and Almeida at Valdezcaray could hardly be more pronounced. The cohesion at Visma | Lease a Bike only accentuated the apparent disarray in UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s approach to the GC on this Vuelta.

Across the calendar, of course, UAE Team Emirates-XRG have been the team of the season, and they have clocked up an astonishing 76 victories this year as they close in inexorably on HTC-Highroad’s record haul from 2009. And, for all the supposed dysfunction on the Vuelta, they still weighed in three wins in as many days in the opening week of the race, including the team time trial.

But at this Vuelta, they’re up against the toughest possible foe. As Vingegaard demonstrated on Sunday, he is very clearly the best rider in the race and the overwhelming favourite for overall victory in Madrid, even if his lead over Almeida is still only 38 seconds. 

For UAE to win the overall title against  Vingegaard, they require something more than an arsenal stocked with raw talent. They need a cohesive team around Almeida and a clear battle plan. Neither was apparent at Valdezcaray.