Key Takeaways: Volta a Valenciana 2025
Breaking down a few key highlights and takeaways from an interesting weekend of racing
With a blinding flurry of early-season racing taking place over the weekend (Etoile de Bessèges, Tour of Oman, Volta Valenciana & more), I’ve attempted to distill the action down to the key moments that I believe will be relevant to the rest of the season. To this aim, I’m breaking down the final four stages at the Volta a Valenciana below, which an impressive Santiago Buitrago won over a João Almeida-led UAE team. With Tadej Pogačar winning the race early in his breakout 2020 season and UAE’s Brandon McNulty winning it last year before going on to finish in the top ten in the Rider Win Rankings, it is clear that form and performance at Valenciana tend to forecast trends for the rest of the season.
Final Overall Top Five
1) Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain-Victorious) +0
2) João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) +18
3) Pello Bilbao (Bahrain-Victorious) +39
4) Thymen Arensman (INEOS Grenadiers) +42
5) Brandon McNulty (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) +53
Volta a Valenciana Stages 2-5
Stage 2
3.2km: After following an attack from Ineos’ Tobias Foss with just under 20km to go, Pello Bilbao and Movistar’s young Iván Romeo leave Foss behind on the final climb.
100m: After Bilbao’s Bahrain teammate Santiago Buitrago bursts from the peloton and rips by the lead duo, he rides clear to the stage win. Bilbao finishes second, with UAE’s João Almeida coming in third, 13 seconds back. Considering the ten-second time bonus for the win, the time Buitrago takes here allows him to recover his large time losses from the Stage 1 TTT, gets him within three seconds of Almeida, and is a massive step toward eventual overall victory.
Stage 2 Top Three
1) Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain-Victorious) +0
2) Pello Bilbao (Bahrain-Victorious) +9
3) João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates - XRG) +13
Stage 3
21.7km: Atop the day's penultimate climb, Almeida outsprints Buitrago to take a three-second time bonus and move into the virtual overall lead.
17km: With Ineos and UAE running out of riders to control the peloton, Movistar’s Romeo attacks and immediately gets a sizable gap.
14.4km: With Romeo holding a 14-second lead, Ineos, whose best-placed rider is Thymen Arensman in 5th, oddly takes responsibility for the chase and puts Tobias Foss on the front, which allows Almeida’s UAE team to sit on.
4.7km-2.6km: As the kilometers tick by, UAE finally has to take up the chase, but Romeo’s massive power sees him actually increasing his lead, pulling his gap out to 27 seconds as they enter the final climb to the finish.
Finish: Romeo impressively holds off the chasing group to win the stage, with Buitrago winning the sprint for second and bonus seconds over Almeida ten seconds later.
Stage 3 Top Three:
1) Iván Romeo (Movistar) +0
2) Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain-Victorious) +10
3) João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates - XRG) +10
Stage 4
11.3km: Movistar was the aggressor once again, with newly-acquired strongman Pablo Castrillo off the front and forcing the GC favorites to burn matches in the peloton behind.
8.5km: After Castrillo is reeled in, Movistar executes textbook tactics by having Jefferson Cepeda attack the front group, now weakened after chasing Castrillo. Again, Ineos takes up responsibility for the chase behind instead of attacking themselves, despite not having a rider on the GC podium.
500m: On the uphill run to the finish, Lidl-Trek’s Jakob Söderqvist puts in a pull for his teammate Jonathan Milan (the two biggest riders in the race) that is so powerful it blows up the peloton and puts anyone not in the first few positions off the back. Buitrago, who is smartly sitting in 5th place, immediately sees what is happening and jumps to reel in Milan.
300m: Buitrago catches and passes Milan on the steep run to the line.
Finish: Buitrago wins the stage and takes the ten-second time bonus, while Milan holds on for second, with the group so shattered that his teammate Söderqvist finishes third ahead of Riley Sheehan in 4th, even after his massive turn. Almeida comes over the line in 7th, ten seconds behind Buitrago, and loses the overall lead after falling into second place overall by 18 seconds.
Stage 4 Top Three:
1) Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain-Victorious) +0
2) Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) +6
3) Jakob Söderqvist (Lidl-Trek) +6
Stage 5
200m: With Milan about to launch his sprint, his Lidl-Trek leadout rider pulls off to the left, with Milan positioned firmly against the barriers.
150m: This maneuver from Milan’s leadout means that any other sprinter looking to come around the two Lidl-Trek riders has to either hug the barriers, where Milan could move over and block them, or go a long way around on the left, which is what Israel-Premier Tech’s Jake Stewart is forced to do.
Finish: This perfect setup from Lidl-Trek means that Milan, by far the fastest and most powerful sprinter in this field, can put daylight between his rear wheel and the rest as he powers to the stage win.
Stage 5 Top Three:
1) Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) +0
2) Jake Stewart (Israel-Premier Tech) +0
3) Giovanni Lonardi (Polti VisitMalta) +0
Key Takeaways:
Santiago Buitrago’s Dominant Ride Teases Big Things to Come in 2025: We could dive into a few different granular reasons how the 25-year-old Colombian took down a stacked João Almeida-led UAE team to rack up his first career pro stage race victory (better positioning, superior feel for the race), but the simple fact is that he was simply the strongest GC rider at this race and repeatedly put himself in position to showcase that fact.
For example, not even spotting Almeida and Brandon McNulty 21 seconds in the opening team time trial could get in his way, and Buitrago would go on to take 39 seconds on Almeida over the next four stages.
In addition to taking 22 seconds on the open road, Buitrago leveraged his better positioning and explosiveness to rack up a 17-second time bonus differential on Almeida.
The only remaining question is how far Buitrago can go in 2025 when it comes to Grand Tour GC.
He lacks a truly convincing time trial, but he finished 10th at the 2024 Tour de France and his Bahrain team will be hoping his strong start to the season will allow him to improve on that position in 2025.
João Almeida’s Continued Struggles With Technical and Fast Late-Race Situations Will Be an Issue as He Attempts to Win Grand Tours: If Buitrago’s performance teased significant improvement, João Almeida’s failure to hold the race lead merely confirmed that he has yet to solve his now chronic issues of staying well positioned at the end of tough stages and inability to capitalize on time bonuses due to being unable to follow his rival’s far more explosive efforts.
Even with solid support from defending Valenciana winner McNulty and the rest of his UAE team, which gave him a significant headstart on his main GC rival, he leaked so much time to Buitrago on explosive uphill finishes, likely through a combination of positioning errors and physically inability to follow, that he was soundly defeated.
While these issues won’t be as big of a problem in three-week Grand Tours, where small margins are less important than the ability to hold high sustained watts on long climbs and in time trials, it will make it difficult for Almeida to get over the hump of being a consistent Grand Tour podium contender to actually consistently winning stage races.
Movistar & Ineos Created a Fascinating Dichotomy All Week Long: Behind the fight for the win, a fascinating contrast was happening between Movistar and Ineos: While Ineos appeared unaware of the race situation as they rode incredibly defensively as they shepherded Thymen Arensman to a distance 4th place and Carlos Rodríguez to a disappointing 6th, Movistar completely understood the assignment as they looked to rip the race to shreds using guerrilla tactics to get riders up the road before sitting in and forcing others to work to reel them in and attacking as soon as the catch was made.
The combination of Ineos’ ultra-conservative racing and lack of a win or overall podium to show for it was somewhat shocking and once again highlights their recurring issue so far in 2025; appearing incredibly strong in nearly every race but lacking the ability to convert this form into wins (so far in 2025, Q36.5, the team of their departing star Tom Pidcock, has more quality wins than Ineos).
While Egan Bernal’s pair of wins at the Colombian national TT and Road Race titles are a nice reward for his long-fought return from injury, the ever-increasing level at the races he will target means that he will likely suffer from the same issue of being strong but not strong enough to ride his competition off his wheel with traditional passive tactics during his European 2025 campaign.
Meanwhile, Movistar, a team that had almost no momentum coming into the season after losing Oier Lazkano and Alex Aranburu over the off-season, executed its aggressive tactics to such a degree that it almost appeared to be attempting to show Ineos how to leverage a collection of strong riders to create victories out of thin air.
And, just like Javier Romo at the Tour Down Under, they sent a young rider, this time 21-year-old Iván Romeo, to a career-first pro win after putting in an incredibly impressive solo ride.
Jonathan Milan & Lidl-Trek Look Ready to Cause Problems at the Classics: While they didn’t factor in the final GC standings, Lidl-Trek threw down a massive marker after showing off their high-powered engines on the race’s flatter sections, with Jonathan Milan not only winning the final sprint but looking like a potential Classics spoiler.
For example, while Milan and the rest of the team executed the Stage 1 team time trial and Stage 5 sprint finish, the most impressive bit of riding from Lidl-Trek for me was their shredding of the peloton on the uphill run to the line on Stage 3, with the twin monsters of Söderqvist and Milan manhandling nearly every climber long after every other sprinter had been dropped.
For Milan to pull his 84-kilo frame (185lbs) through the stage in the front group and ride everyone but Buitrago off his wheel on the final climb, he would have to be generating a level of sustained power that will give him a chance of getting through the toughest parts of the Classics with the sport’s top tier (Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel, and Tadej Pogačar).
With a well-drilled Lidl-Trek squad giving Van der Poel fits at last year’s Gent-Wevelgem, it would be wise to keep an eye out for the team when they show up with an even fitter second option in 2025.