Brennan wants Tour de France yellow on home roads after fourth Vuelta win

Helped by an expert lead-out from Visma | Lease a Bike teammate Wout van Aert, Brennan thundered to victory on stage 16 of the Vuelta a España in La Rábida, beating Bryan Coquard (Cofidis) into second place.

Brennan is the first man to win four stages in his debut Grand Tour since a young Fernando Gaviria achieved the feat on the 2017 Giro d’Italia. The following summer, Gaviria followed up by scorching to victory and the yellow jersey on the opening stage of the Tour de France.

The 2027 Tour gets under way with a stage from Edinburgh to Carlisle on July 2, and Brennan already has the date marked on his calendar. 

“I already said it to the team two years ago now, when I came up with the idea, or when I heard about the UK start,” Brennan said. 

“For myself, I’d really like to be there on the start line and to have guys like Wout [van Aert] and Christophe [Laporte] there also. If we can do the same thing as we did here, we can really try to copy what we do and replicate that into a yellow jersey on day one.”

On this form, Brennan will give Visma | Lease a Bike a luxury selection headache for next year’s Tour, as they seek to balance his enormous potential with Jonas Vingegaard’s annual general classification ambitions. 

In the here and now, Visma are enjoying a hugely successful Vuelta. They now have six stage wins through Brennan and Van Aert, while the Belgian also holds a commanding lead atop the points classification.

“It’s unbelievable, four victories here. The plan was for one,” Brennan said. “And as a team, we’re now on six, I think. We’ve lost count, we’ve won so many and you know, the stages that we’ve gone for, we’ve really committed to the plan that we have.”

The terrain on stage 16 lent itself to a sprint but controlling the peloton is never a straightforward task at this juncture of a Grand Tour. Visma were prominent throughout the day, however, with Steven Kruijswijk playing a key role in his final Grand Tour appearance.

“You’ve seen the boys all day today, they’ve just been pushing so much wind,” Brennan said. “To finish it off like that, with Wout bringing me up like that in such a chaotic final, it was perfect.”

At the beginning of the Vuelta, it wasn’t immediately clear if Visma would be able to balance the ambitions of both Van Aert and Brennan, but they have combined harmoniously since the race left Monaco.

“I don’t really think you can compete, you know,” Brennan said of Van Aert’s lead-out here. “It was a really big shame that we lost Christophe, but it’s still unbelievable what we can do, even when we’re a man down in these types of situations and, you know, I really trusted Wout and I followed his wheel all the way. It’s incredible he can bring you in such a perfect position in such a chaotic race.”