Roglic faces new reality after familiar road to the Vuelta

Primož Roglič has been here before. Three of his six appearances at the Vuelta a España have been preceded by July crashes, and so the doubts that shrouded his participation this year weren’t entirely new.

Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe were coy on Roglič’s participation ever since word broke of his training crash in late July, and the team made a show of downplaying his general classification prospects when they finally confirmed his place in their line-up on Tuesday.

The primary objective, they insisted, was stage victories. Roglič’s tilt at a record-breaking fifth Vuelta victory, by contrast, was a “second” target. “We have to be realistic because his preparation has been very different from what we originally anticipated after his crash,” sports director Sven Vanthourenhout said.

Even so, it’s telling that Red Bull still resisted the temptation to change Giulio Pellizzari’s late-season plans and send him to the Vuelta. Luke Tuckwell’s Grand Tour debut will be worth following closely after his assured displays at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and the Tour de Romandie, but the Australian is a future prospect rather than an immediate guarantee.

In the here and now, and for all their caveats, Red Bull have stuck to the original plan of building their Vuelta challenge around Roglič. And with good reason: no rider in the race’s history has a record quite like Roglič.

His haul of four wins and a third-place finish from six participations doesn’t tell the full story. Beyond those numbers, Roglič has always lined up in August blessed with an intangible gift: he appears to be a man uniquely suited to the modern Vuelta’s status as the quintessential race of second chances.

In 2019, the Vuelta marked a career-defining do-over for Roglič after he fell flat at a Giro d’Italia he had initially threatened to dominate. In 2020, after he had been sent sprawling by Tadej Pogačar’s late haymaker at the Tour de France, Roglič picked himself off the canvas and defended his Vuelta title in that year’s pandemic-delayed edition.

His legs may have wobbled from under him amid Richard Carapaz’s flurry of punches on a fraught final weekend, but Roglič held firm and underscored a key difference between the Tour and the Vuelta in the process. If the Tour demands perfection from its winners, then the Vuelta rewards those who simply show up and grind their way through it. Nobody, not even Alex Zülle in 1996 and 1997, has done it quite like Roglič.

The Vuelta is the final Grand Tour at the tail end of a bruising season: nobody arrives on the start line without carrying some kind of physical or mental residue from their exertions across the season, and few victors serve up anything like perfection across the three weeks. 

Roglič’s great gift as a Vuelta rider has been his ability to park his Tour or Giro disappointments, ignore any lingering injuries, and clock in for a three-week shift in Spain. There will be good days and bad days, but Roglič’s wager is that the former will outweigh the latter over the course of the Vuelta.

While Roglič’s 2021 Vuelta triumph was his most impressive – and arguably the best of his entire career – his last victory in 2024 was the most emblematic of his ability to gauge the temperature of a Vuelta better than any other rider. 

Roglič showed up for that Vuelta off the back of another crash at the Tour and amid questions over Red Bull’s decision to sign him in the first place. In the absence of Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel, Roglič was the de facto favourite for the Vuelta, but it was clear that he was not at his best, early stage wins at Pico Villuercas and Cazorla notwithstanding.

But even though Roglič’s performances were uneven across the three weeks, he still delivered a masterclass in the art of winning the Vuelta. On his bad days, like at Cuitu Negru and Lagos da Covadonga, he did just enough to ensure his challenge didn’t unravel. And then he proceeded to stitch it up with a towering display on the Alto de Moncalvillo two days from Madrid.

Roglič may have been cursed never to win the Tour, but he seemed to be blessed with the ability to find his way to the red jersey of the Vuelta in much the same way a river inevitably finds the shore. Were it not for a heavy crash in 2022 and team orders a year later, Roglič might – might – have an even better winning ratio at the Vuelta. 

Red Bull’s hope, then, is that Roglič will toggle into Vuelta mode once the race leaves Monaco on Saturday, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that the lie of the land at this edition is very different to his previous Spanish expeditions – and not only because Pogačar is on the start line and thus the overwhelming favourite. 

Now 36, Roglič has won just one stage race – the 2025 Volta a Catalunya – since his last Vuelta victory. His 2026 results have been uninspiring: fifth at Tirreno-Adriatico, 16th at Itzulia Basque Country, 18th at the Tour de Romandie, eighth at the Tour de Suisse.

And unlike each of his successful Vuelta outings, Roglič isn’t in Spain for a repechage. After signing Remco Evenepoel last winter, Red Bull quickly began phasing Roglič out. He was deemed surplus to requirements at the Giro, where Jai Hindley placed third, and at the Tour, where Evenepoel finished second. 

It’s not quite Ruben Amorim’s infamous ‘bomb squad’ during his tenure at Manchester United, but Roglič has been consigned to Vuelta leadership since the start of the season, and it has grown apparent across the year that he will leave Red Bull when his contract expires in December.

This Vuelta will play out against the backdrop of Roglič’s negotiations with a series of suitors, with Pinarello-Q36.5 and, intriguingly, Lotto Intermarché among the teams reportedly interested in securing his services for 2027. A strong showing at the Vuelta would strengthen Roglič’s bargaining position considerably, and it promises to be one of the key subplots of the race.

The Vuelta is headlined by Pogačar, of course, and it seems impossible to imagine anybody other than the world champion triumphing in Granada on September 13. Pogačar returns to the Vuelta for the first time since he placed third behind Roglič on his Grand Tour debut in 2019, a race that marked the formal beginning of Slovenian cycling’s golden age.

Between them, Roglič and Pogačar have won 11 of the past 21 Grand Tours. Slovenia’s share might be higher again had Roglič not played such a key role in helping Jonas Vingegaard crack Pogačar on the 2022 Tour. 

Back then, Roglič would still have considered himself Pogačar’s peer over three weeks. He would have felt he squandered chances to put the 2020 Tour beyond Pogačar’s reach before La Planche des Belles Filles, and he would have bitterly rued the crashes that ended his own challenge prematurely in 2021 and 2022.

These days, Pogačar is operating on a different plane to Roglič and everybody else. Only Chris Froome has achieved the Tour-Vuelta double since the Grand Tour calendar was rearranged in 1995, but, barring illness or injury, Pogačar looks destined to join him. 

Roglič is simply vying to be the best of the rest behind the five-time Tour champion. For the first time in his Vuelta career, he is not the de facto favourite, and he is not the rider setting the standard for everybody else. That is an unfamiliar position for arguably the perfect prototype of a Vuelta champion, not that he will complain. 

But turning up is always a key part of the equation at the Vuelta. Like he’s always done, Roglič will follow the road wherever it takes him.