Key Takeaways: Vuelta a España Stage 9

Breaking down the hardest stage of the race up to this point & taking stock of where things stand on the Vuelta's first rest day

Continuing the chaos that has marked the battle for the overall classification at the 2024 Vuelta a España, Adam Yates, after getting into an early breakaway with two strong UAE teammates, built up a sizable advantage before surging clear alone in pursuit of the stage win. After 50 kilometers and a hefty number of vertical meters gained on the brutally steep roads around Granada, nestled at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in southern Spain, Yates held off a chasing Richard Carapaz to grab the most impressive win of his decorated career and climb back into the GC picture.

Behind, serious cracks began to appear in the usually steely facade of Primož Roglič, who was briefly distanced by his own Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team and couldn’t respond to a lifting in pace from GC rival Enric Mas. However, while the race briefly appeared to be riding up the road, Roglič quickly recovered and settled into a high pace on the remainder of the climb while race leader Ben O’Connor, who looked impressively solid the entire team, reeled in Mas and significantly diminished the advantage Yates and Carapaz were able to take.

Check out the blow-by-blow stage breakdown, as well as a few rest day reflections, below:

Stage 9 Top Five:
1) Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) +1’39
3) Ben O'Connor (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) +3’45
4) Mikel Landa (Soudal Quick-Step) +3’45
5) Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +3’45

Time Select GC Contenders Gained(+)/Lost(-) On Stage 9:
Adam Yates +0
Richard Carapaz -1'45
Ben O’Connor -3’57
David Gaudu -3’59
Primož Roglič -4’01
Enric Mas -4’01
Mikel Landa -4’01
Carlos Rodríguez -4’01
Florian Lipowitz -4’01
Mattias Skjelmose -5’51
Sepp Kuss -5’51
Lennert Van Eetvelt -7’37
George Bennett -7’37
Isaac Del Toro -36’11

Current GC Top Ten
1) Ben O'Connor (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) +0
2) Primož Roglič (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +3’53
3) Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) +4’32
4) Enric Mas (Movistar) +4’35
5) Mikel Landa (Soudal Quick-Step) +5’17
6) Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +5’29
7) Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates) +5’30
8) Felix Gall (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) +5’30
9) Carlos Rodríguez (INEOS Grenadiers) +6’00
10) David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ) +6’32

Where The Top Four Have Won/Lost Time So Far

• Stage 1 Time Trial
  Primož Roglič +0
  Enric Mas -22
  Richard Carapaz -23
  Ben O’Connor -35

• Stage 4 Summit Finish
  Primož Roglič +0
  Enric Mas -10
  Ben O’Connor -1’21
  Richard Carapaz -1’39

• Stage 6 Summit Finish
  Ben O’Connor +0
  Primož Roglič -6’47
  Enric Mas -6’47
  Richard Carapaz -6’47

• Stage 8 Summit Finish
  Primož Roglič +0
  Enric Mas -4
  Richard Carapaz -49
  Ben O’Connor -56

• Stage 9 Mountains
  Richard Carapaz +0
  Ben O’Connor -2’12
  Primož Roglič -2’16
  Enric Mas -2’16

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Stage 9 Race Notebook

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87.7km-to-go: With a strong breakaway up the road, which includes three UAE riders, including Adam Yates, just over four minutes up the road, Red Bull-Bora comes to the front to pace to keep the stage win in play and keep Yates from repeating O’Connor’s Stage 6 GC comeback. However, the pace isn’t particularly taut, which allows Richard Carapaz to launch an attack and head off in pursuit of the leaders.

82.4km: Up front, Yates’ UAE teammates are drilling the pace, which breaks up the group and drives their advantage out to nearly five minutes.

60.5km: Carapaz eventually bridges up to his teammate, Darren Rafferty, who was dropped back from the breakaway and begins driving the pace to pull Carapaz clear of the peloton in an effort to get him back into the GC picture.

60.4km: As Yates hits the bottom of the day’s penultimate climb, he is still being paced by his UAE teammate, Jay Vine, with David Gaudu on his wheel. Back in the peloton, Red Bull-Bora is setting a pace that has the gap hovering around 4’27.

54.1km: After Yates drops both Vine and Gaudu, he crests the climb alone and sets off in pursuit of a stage win while Red Bull-Bora, still pacing behind, has let the gap explode out to 5’35.

30km: Yates hits the base of the final climb (which is the same climb used for the penultimate climb) still in the lead, as Carapaz attacks and drops Gaudu behind as he sets off in pursuit.

27.9km: Back in the quickly shrinking peloton, Roglič is riding on the wheels of his two remaining Red Bull-Bora teammates (Aleksandr Vlasov and Florian Lipowitz). Race leader Ben O’Connor, along with Enric Mas, are sitting comfortably behind.

27.7km: After Vlasov pulls off, Lipowitz appears to increase the pace too much, which distances Roglič. Blood is now in the water, with Red Bull accidentally exposing Roglič as not being on a good day.

27.5km: Enric Mas quickly looks to capitalize on this by increasing the pace and riding clear of the Roglič group.

27.4km: Mas, attacking for perhaps the first time in his career, rides clear, with Pavel Sivakov closely behind.

27.2km-26.3km: Mas keeps tapping out a smooth, steady pace on the incredibly steep (and hot) climb, while Roglič paces a group with Lipowitz and O’Connor roughly a minute behind. It may appear odd that Lipowitz is on Roglič’s wheel here instead of emptying the tank pacing for Roglič, but with him riding so high up in the GC on the day, it does serve the team for him to do everything he can to get over this final climb in the group without being dropped.

22.8km: As Yates crests the summit and begins the descent to the finish, the (somewhat suspect) time gaps have him two minutes ahead of Carapaz, 4’48 ahead of Mas, and a shocking 5’49 ahead of Roglič and O’Connor.

14km: Enric Mas loses control on the descent and nearly goes off the road. However, a gravel pullout saves him, and he quickly starts rolling. However, the damage has been done, and he has lost a good portion of the time advantage he had pulled out on the climb.

Yates Finish: Adam Yates cruises over the finish line, clearly savoring the impressive win and not worrying about the GC.

Carapaz Finish: 1’38 behind, Richard Carapaz sprints over the line, clearly fighting for every possible second in order to better his GC position.

GC Group Chase: On the fast, open roads coming off the descent, even though his race lead isn’t in danger, O’Connor is taking massive pulls to decrease the time Yates and Carapaz net from their big escapes. This tells us he weathered the brutal day incredibly well.

GC Group Finish: Just 3’45 later, O’Connor sprints in for third from the GC chase group. Oddly, Roglič doesn’t sprint, which allows O’Connor to get a four-second time bonus and actually extend his GC lead over Roglič,

Three Rest Day Reflections

1) A Down and Out Team UAE Is Proving to Be an Agent of Chaos: I wondered in Saturday’s newsletter that UAE’s misfortunate and poor performances through the first eight stages could make them dangerous and prone to attacking since they would have nothing to lose by getting in the breakaway and nothing to gain by sitting tight in the bunch. Today, Adam Yates’ massive and impressive ride to sustain a gap over the GC group over three brutal climbs made it obvious that this is indeed the case and that they will likely continue to be a major thorn in the side of Primož Roglič and his Red Bull-Bora team.

• While their GC ceiling appears limited since, even after today’s raid, their best-placed riders are Adam Yates in 7th and Pavel Sivakov in 11th, and no other viable threats after the collapse of Isaac Del Toro on the brutal slopes and the abandonment of João Almeida due to COVID, a collection of riders this strong with nothing to lose is still something that should keep Roglič and Red Bull management up at night.

  • With Yates looking as strong as he did today and now having a rest day to recover from the effort, it would be foolish to count him out, even though he claimed that he isn’t thinking about the GC classification.

2) Red Bull-Bora & Primož Roglič Are Being Forced to Ride in a Way That Exposes Their Weaknesses: It may have appeared like Red Bull-Bora was struggling to control the dangerous breakaway and ride a pace hard enough to deter attacks coming from within the peloton, but just judging their work by the day’s end result would show that despite looking ragged and worked over at times, Roglič’s completed their task of letting the race get completely out of control.

• However, setting this ‘on paper’ positive aside, the stage exposed serious weaknesses in both the Red Bull team and Roglič personally. After all, a team with a truly firm grasp on this race would not have allowed Adam Yates to ride clear with two strong teammates on a difficult mountain stage. And if Roglič were at his best, he wouldn’t have lost ground to an (extremely rare) Enric Mas acceleration on the final climb.

  • But, before we levy too much criticism on Red Bull-Bora, it is worth pointing out that due to the hard racing and extreme heat the peloton has experienced throughout southern Spain, it is very likely that no single team or rider in this race would be capable of controlling this race.

    • With this in mind, managing the chaos, like they did today, could be a worthy strategy instead of going deep and trying to control it early on before completely cratering later in the stage.

• The somewhat surreal image of Enric Mas dropping Roglič on the day’s final climb could suggest that the three-time overall winner is on the verge of cracking, but if we pull out, Roglič suffering near the end of long, difficult mountain stages is fairly routine, and this likely signals his current limitations more than an impending implosion.

  • These troubles highlight the problem with Red Bull giving O’Connor so much time back on Stage 6 since, to make the time back, they will have to make these mountain stages as hard as possible in order to attempt to put O’Connor under pressure to take the time back.

    • Unfortunately for Red Bull, this riding style actually increases the chances of Roglič losing time since he has never been a rider who thrives in those conditions.

3) Ben O’Connor Has Quietly Taken a Massive Step Toward Overall Victory: It may be lost amongst the nonstop GC action on Stage 9, but amid the constant GC re-shuffling over the last few days, O’Connor has largely kept his sizable GC lead intact and stood strong on one of the Vuelta’s hardest stages. All while reversing the expected Roglič time bonuses onslaught by actually taking time bonuses on the stage while Roglič failed to get any.

• The race leader’s team may not be capable or even willing to control the race, but thanks to his solid lead over Roglič and massive lead over the rest of the truly proven GC climbers like Mas, Landa, and Yates, it is actually working in their favor.

  • As stated above, the hard racing required to chase down O’Connor doesn’t actually play to Roglič’s strengths.

    • When Decathlon allows riders like Adam Yates to go up the road in breakaways, it simply adds more pressure to O’Connor’s main rivals due to his time cushion. This means it becomes someone else’s problem before it affects him, and it forces other teams to come to the front to pace instead of his Decathlon teammates needing to work.

Stage 10 Preview

After a cross-country rest day flight, the peloton will face a cruel welcome back to racing with tomorrow’s 160-kilometer stage in Galicia, which starts with a long, 15.3-kilometer long climb and features constant up-and-down terrain all day and the finish line coming off the descent of a tough first category climb.

• While the terrain may be unfriendly, the peloton will be happy to say goodbye to Andalusia's boiling-hot temperatures as they head into the much more mild climate along the country’s northwest coast.

• Riders who went deep on Stage 9 will face a difficult test, and we should know by the end of the day if Adam Yates and Richard Carapaz, who significantly improved their GC standings on Sunday, can hold their position from here on out.