Mas met the moment after Pogacar's Vuelta went off script

We’ve grown used to processions in big stage races this year. At the Giro d’Italia, Jonas Vingegaard had it all wrapped up before the final week. At the Tour de France, Tadej Pogačar had the race won by the top of the Tourmalet on stage 6.

The Vuelta a España looked to be going the same way when Pogačar ran up the score with wins in Monaco, Andorra and Castelló in the opening week, amassing a lead of almost four minutes on his rivals. 

Then came the fall. Pogačar’s crash on stage 8 was a reminder of how precarious this whole enterprise is. His succession of triumphs over the past few seasons had felt as inevitable as the tides, but his career year was ended by a stray stone on an anonymous stretch of road 32km outside Xeraco. It was a reminder that even the most crushing dominance in this sport is still a high-wire act.

It had been a coup for the Vuelta organisers to get Pogačar on the start line in the first place, and nobody anticipated anything other than an exhibition. It was like watching a world record attempt in athletics. We already knew the result, and so we were tuning in to see if history would be made, and how.

But Pogačar’s Vuelta was ended abruptly by his broken collarbone and stable neck fracture on stage 8, and now a very different kind of bike race was in play. His pitch for perfection was replaced by a tussle between a group of contenders all with clear flaws.

Enric Mas inherited the red jersey, but he carried with him the mental scars of repeatedly falling short on the big occasion in the past. There were questions, too, regarding the durability of his form given his travails over the preceding two years.

Primož Roglič looked the logical winner, but he was just shy of his 37th birthday and his Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team had ‘demoted’ him from the Tour to the Vuelta this year. To compound matters, he was injured in a training crash in July.

Felix Gall was a man on the up but dogged by a clear weakness against the watch. Richard Carapaz had the pedigree, but he had been shipping time since the race left Monaco. Oscar Onley was oscillating between good days and bad, much like Sepp Kuss.

It made for an intriguing contest over the past two weeks, and it made the Vuelta an entirely different kind of Grand Tour to the Giro or Tour. After the flawless, metronomic exhibitions of Vingegaard and Pogačar, we were witnessing something of a throwback. The imperfections of the contenders meant that jeopardy was baked into the price of this Vuelta, all the way to Saturday’s mammoth stage to Collado del Alguacil.

Mas has been the strongest rider at every turn since Pogačar’s abandon, having already proven himself to be the best of the rest in the opening week. And once he limited his losses on Roglič to just 33 seconds in the stage 18 time trial to Jerez de la Frontera, all logic said that the Vuelta was essentially won. 

But Mas’ track record and the Vuelta’s history of late deviations from the script meant that nobody was anointing him as the champion just yet. Red Bull tested the waters on stage 19 to Peñas Blancas, and they sounded a bullish note about how they might press Mas further on the Vuelta’s toughest stage.

When Mas was caught on the wrong side of an early split on stage 20, it briefly looked as though the Vuelta might spiral beyond his and Movistar’s control in the most calamitous of circumstances.

Movistar reacted by stitching the GC group back together, but then they appeared to overreact by flinging riders up the road, clearly spooked by how Roglič already had teammates Finn Fisher-Black and Gianni Vermeersch out ahead. The gambit would ultimately work, with Raúl García Pierna and Pablo Castrillo playing their part for Mas later in the day, but in the moment, it reeked faintly of panic.

The general sense of risk and danger never abated across the stage, thanks in no small part to the aggression of Carapaz, who was unsuccessfully chasing a podium spot, and Kuss, whose unsuccessful pursuit of a stage win almost catapulted him onto the podium at the last. 

The attacking on the twin ascents of the Purche would doom Onley, who dropped to sixth overall, and it also left Mas isolated for most of the final 90km of the Vuelta’s toughest stage. This was anything but a procession.

Indeed, when Carapaz and Gall began marking one another on the penultimate ascent of Puerto El Duque, the red jersey group would fall more than five minutes behind Kuss, who now had a flying Wout van Aert for company. All of a sudden, there were shades of Simon Yates’ late heist on the 2025 Giro about the afternoon.

Mercifully for Mas, things didn’t escalate to that extent and the viciously tough final haul up Collado del Alguacil ensured that raw strength rather than strategic missteps would win the day. 

It soon became clear that Roglič didn’t have the legs to trouble Mas, and when the Spaniard tracked Gall’s acceleration near the summit, any lingering suspense was lifted. Even though Mas lost contact with Gall in the final 2km, he knew that every pedal stroke was bringing him closer to a prize that had seemed unthinkable when the race left Monaco.

In his press conference afterwards, Mas was asked what this imminent Vuelta triumph meant for his future. He batted the question away. “Let me enjoy the Vuelta, please,” Mas said, and he was right.

At 31 years of age, and in the era of Pogačar and Vingegaard and Del Toro and Seixas, Mas knows that this is almost certainly as good as it’s ever going to get. Pogačar’s abandon didn’t create a vacuum that Mas filled; it simply led to a particular moment in time and he seized it. 

And that’s already plenty. We’ve grown too accustomed to dominance and perfection in 2020s cycling. A one-off triumph has plenty of value too. 

This Vuelta wasn’t better or worse without Pogačar, but it was radically different. Unpredictable, unruly and wild, just like its penultimate stage. A moment in time.