Vingegaard's form, UAE's focus - Five questions for the final week of the Vuelta a España

When Jonas Vingegaard scorched to victory at Limone Piemonte on stage 2, the script of this race seemed to be already written. Head and shoulders above everybody bar Tadej Pogačar at the Tour de France, Vingegaard now looked set to dominate the Vuelta from start to finish. 

It hasn’t quite played out that way. Although Vingegaard dropped everyone to win at Valdezcaray on stage 9 and then moved back into the red jersey at the start of week two, he hasn’t hammered home his superiority. Far from it. As the second week drew on, it became apparent that Vingegaard was managing the race rather than crushing it.

On the Angliru, it was João Almeida who brought the race to Vingegaard, and the Dane was equally content to follow his rival at La Farrapona the following day. True, Vingegaard never looked particularly troubled by Almeida’s forcing, but he has a lead of just 48 seconds at the beginning of the third week, which is hardly the most reliable safety net in a race like this. If Vingegaard was strong enough to open a bigger gap on Almeida by now, he would surely have done so.

When Vingegaard beat Pogačar in the 2022 and 2023 Tours, he placed much stock in his powers of endurance and his ability to withstand the third week better than his rival. He will hope that aptitude will see him through against Almeida, but this Vuelta is an entirely different beast, coming so suddenly after his exertions at the Tour.

Vingegaard would have timed his peak for 2025 for the Tour, and the month-long turnaround between the Grand Boucle and the Vuelta was largely an exercise in trying to maintain that condition. It is now over nine weeks since the Grand Départ of the Tour, however, and Vingegaard, one assumes, must be feeling the effects of two Grand Tours in quick succession. That fatigue presents an opportunity for Almeida, who is notionally fresher after abandoning the Tour after a week.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then there are plenty of things about 2020s cycling that challenge the orthodoxy of generations past. UAE Team Emirates-XRG have a genuine contender for the final overall victory, yet the squad has repeatedly seemed to prioritise the pursuit of stage wins over protecting the interests of João Almeida. It’s hard to say what’s more remarkable at this point – UAE’s seven stage wins from fifteen, or the fact that Almeida is so close to Vingegaard despite a less than coherent supporting cast.

In UAE’s defence, it could be argued that there was only one day – a crucial one, mind, to Valdezcaray – where Almeida was truly left exposed by the lack of teammates by his side. But one has to imagine that the strategy will finally change in the third week.

Sports manager Matxin Joxean Fernandez suggested as much when he spoke to Marca on Monday’s rest day. “We’ve had the opportunity to score victories in the breakaway, but now it’s time to go for the big one,” Matxin said, though in the same breath, he laughed that he still had dreams that his team could rack up 100 wins for the 2025 season.

Still, Matxin acknowledged that overall victory at the Vuelta is within reach, and he insisted that his team would now be devoted to Almeida. It should help that Jay Vine, Marc Soler and the departing Juan Ayuso have already won stages, but it’s not entirely clear if those wins have sated all their ambitions. 

“We have to try in every way possible. There will be stages where the route itself will determine a natural selection, and in others, we can consider something collective,” Matxin said. “We’ll have to act in very different ways depending on the day.”

A key figure in all this will be Ayuso. While Vine has shown himself to be a reliable support for Almeida, Ayuso’s participation in the collective effort has been decidedly more sporadic. He was AWOL on the Angliru a day after his second breakaway win. He was better on the Farrapona stage, but still a long way off his true capability. A fully-engaged Ayuso could tip the balance in Almeida’s favour, but his fractious departure from UAE means it’s anyone’s guess as to what he will do in the third week.

There was precious little to separate Almeida and Vingegaard on the Asturian summit finishes. Almeida’s forcing was impressive, but he lacks the explosive acceleration needed to get separation from Vingegaard. The maillot rojo, meanwhile, still packs a punch, but as Valdezcaray showed, Almeida ultimately has the ability to stay within the orbit of this off-peak version of Vingegaard.

On that evidence, it’s easy to imagine Vingegaard and Almeida fighting out a relative stalemate on the Vuelta’s remaining summit finishes. In that light, the stage 18 time trial in Valladolid could take on outsize significance. 

The beauty of the time trial is that it’s hard to say who has the advantage. Almeida’s prowess against the watch means that he has earmarked the stage since the start of the Vuelta, but Vingegaard has produced some astonishing time trials over the years too. 

Their head-to-head record in time trials is inconclusive. Almeida leads that series 4-3, but that includes a time trial in the under-23 Le Triptyque des Monts et Chateaux back in 2018. 

This season, Vingegaard beat Almeida in the Volta ao Algarve, though that was a hilly test up the Alto do Malhão. Almeida, meanwhile, beat Vingegaard by seven seconds in the Caen time trial at the Tour, though that was a particular jour sans for the Dane and his Visma team. By contrast, Vingegaard et al had enjoyed marked superiority over their UAE counterparts in the Dauphiné time trial the previous month.

Two years ago, incidentally, the Vuelta also featured a Valladolid time trial on a similar but not quite identical route (25.8km versus this year’s 27.2km). Back then, Almeida put 28 seconds into Vingegaard. A similar display here would set the Vuelta up for a grandstand finale at Bola del Mundo, but some caveats apply. That test came ten days in rather than deep into the final week. 

This time out, their relative accumulated fatigue will be a pivotal factor. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess – which makes it the ultimate race of truth.

While the race for the maillot rojo is very evidently a duel between Almeida and Vingegaard, the third step of the podium increasingly looks to be a contest between Tom Pidcock (Q36.5) and a resurgent Jai Hindley (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), even if Felix Gall (Decathlon-AG2R) is still firmly in the hunt.

Pidcock has exceeded all expectations thus far. He impressed particularly at Valdezcaray, where he tracked Almeida all the way to the summit, and again on the neutralised stage to Bilbao, where he achieved the rare feat of dropping Vingegaard on the Alto de Pike. Since then, Pidcock has been on the back foot, but he limited the damage well at both the Angliru and La Farrapona, climbs that hardly suit his characteristics. 

The problem for the Briton isn’t his own form, but rather the growing assurance of Hindley, who seems to be improving as the race draws on and the climbs grow longer. The Australian impressed with his acceleration on La Farrapona, and he is forming a fine double act with Giulio Pellizzari (sixth at 4:21). 

As his Giro displays of 2020 and 2022 demonstrate, Hindley withstands the vagaries of the third week better than most. That pedigree makes him the favourite for the third step of the podium, but it will be fascinating to see how this new, Grand Tour-ready iteration of Pidcock fares in the Vuelta’s final days.

A Grand Tour never takes place in a vacuum. By its very definition, the race tours a country. That means it showcases its geography and its architecture, but on occasion it can also provide a window into the country’s mood. A notable recent example was the 2020 Giro, where the race was a symbol of Italy’s recovery from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and a reflection of the measures it was taking against the second.

This Vuelta is taking Spain’s pulse in a similar way. The race has taken place in a country where the general populace is increasingly aghast at the horrors unfolding in Gaza, and where prime minster Pedro Sánchez has repeatedly condemned Israel’s invasion. “It’s exterminating a defenceless people. It’s breaking all the rules of humanitarian law,” Sánchez said on Monday.

In that light, it’s hardly surprising that a Vuelta featuring the Israel-Premier Tech team has been a flashpoint for human rights demonstrations and protests against Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza.

Those demonstrations saw stage 11 to Bilbao shortened and further protests – along with some heavy-handed policing – have contributed to at least two crashes on the Vuelta. The Vuelta organisation and some riders have strongly suggested that Israel-Premier Tech’s withdrawal would help ensure the safety of the peloton, but Sylvan Adams’ team remain in the race, and the UCI continues to avoid the question altogether, dutifully mimicking the IOC’s inertia on the same issue.

The UCI’s statement on Wednesday evening spoke of the governing body’s “commitment to the political neutrality,” but the notion that sports and politics don’t mix is disingenuous at best. In May, for instance, the Giro d’Italia began in Albania against the backdrop of the deal Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government had struck with the country over the processing of migrants. There was no mealy-mouthed statement from the UCI about “political neutrality” then.

On Sunday evening, the Vuelta organisation was forced to deny a report that the final stage in Madrid risked cancellation due to the very real risk of significant human rights demonstrations, but a firmly worded statement won’t make the issue disappear. The protests look set to continue all week, and so will the questions over the Vuelta’s final stage.