Key Takeaways: Vuelta a España Stage 3
Breaking down how the Vuelta's unusually early mountain stage was won and how it has already significantly shaped the GC picture
Remco Evenepoel took advantage of an usually early mountain stage, and absolutely unbeatable form, to win the third stage of the 2023 Vuelta a España on a difficult summit finish against the backdrop of the imposing Pyrenees mountains high in the principality of Andorra. Behind, Jumbo-Visma’s Jonas Vingegaard showed he has carried his Tour de France-winning form into the race by emerging as the best of the rest to finish second on the day, while the youth sensation and last Vuelta’s third-place finisher, Juan Ayuso came in third.
Evenepoel’s win, where he opened up a slight, but symbolically significant one-second time gap, and racked up a key ten-second time bonus, put him in the early race lead, and means that after just three days of racing, he has opened up large time advantages on key GC contenders like Vingegaard, Ayuso and Primož Roglič. However, despite the stage win and time gains, Evenepoel’s day was dampened by a post-race crash when he entered the poorly placed staff zone with too much speed, collided with a team staff member, crashed hard, and suffered a significant blow to his face/head. The bizarre turn of events continued the comedy of errors that has been this Vuelta so far and will add a significant hurdle to Evenepoel’s title defense if he is feeling the effects of the blow in the coming stages.
Stage Top Five:
1) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
2) Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo) +1
3) Juan Ayuso (UAE) +1
4) Primož Roglič (Jumbo) +1
5) Marc Soler (UAE) +1
Current GC Top Five:
1) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
2) Enric Mas (Movistar) +5
3) Lenny Martinez (FDJ) +11
4) Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo) +31
5) Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora) +33
Key GC Stage Time Gaps
Evenepoel: +0
Vingegaard: lost 5 second
Ayuso: lost 7 seconds
Roglič/Mas/Almeida: lost 11-seconds
Thomas: lost 57 seconds
Filtered GC Standings:
1) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
2) Enric Mas (Movistar) +5
4) Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo) +31
5) Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora) +33
10) Primož Roglič +37
11) Juan Ayuso +38
13) João Almeida +42
21) Geraint Thomas +1’11
Stage 3 Race Notebook:
86.7km: A strong breakaway finally gets clear after a hotly contested beginning to the race. However, with Damiano Caruso, the 4th place finisher at the 2023 Giro d’Italia and 2nd place finisher at the 2021 Giro, present in the move, the GC teams in the peloton behind keep the move on the short leash with a hard, steady pace that has the group lined out single file on the slightly uphill run into Andorra.
4.3km: With a small group, which still includes Caruso, still dangling 1’36 ahead, Jumbo-Visma appearing hesitant to burn their riders setting a hard pace and road quickly running out, UAE gets to the front and increases the speed.
1.9km: Juan Ayuso attacks off UAE’s hard pace, and is quickly and closely followed by Jonas Vingegaard.
1.8km: However, while Vingegaard is tucked into Ayuso’s slipstream and the onus now on Remco Evenepoel/Enric Mas to close the gap into the headwind, the rest of the Jumbo team, Sepp Kuss and Primož Roglič, quickly respond by bridging across and allowing Evenepoel to follow in the slipstream (thus eliminating their own numerical advantage).
1.6km: The odd Jumbo scramble appears to make some sense when Kuss attacks off Ayuso’s pace shortly after, which potentially sets Kuss up for a stage win and forces Ayuso to chase.
600m: Once Kuss’ attack is brought to heel, the American stays on the front and sets a high pace to deter late attacks and set up his GC leaders, Roglič and Vingegaard, for a potential stage win (and time bonuses).
325m: Coming into the sprint, Vingegaard is sitting right on Evenepoel’s wheel, who is occupying the coveted inside line and has a clean path to open his sprint, while Roglič is sitting on the outside, and is quickly boxed in.
300m: Evenepoel leverages his perfect position to open up an incredibly early sprint. Vingegaard uses his position right on his wheel to immediately match him while Roglič, now shuffled too far back and blocked, can’t follow.
175m: When Evenepoel leads Vingegaard into the final uphill hairpin, we can see just how much space he has opened up on the others in a short amount of time, and that anyone behind Vingegaard in second wheel is already out of contention for the stage win.
125m: Evenepoel unleashes a massive acceleration out of the corner that Vingegaard can’t react to, and he is able to open up a stage-winning and time-yielding gap.
Finish: Evenepoel’s gap holds as he coasts over the finish line to take a 10-second time bonus and a 1-second time gap on the others. Vingegaard gets a 6-second bonus for 2nd, and Ayuso gets a 4-second bonus for 3rd.
Post-Finish: Due to coming over the line with so much speed and his hands off the bars, Evenepoel flies into the poorly arranged/placed staff area at an extremely high pace, slams into an Arkéa–Samsic staff member, and emerges covered in blood due to hitting his face on the ground. This is a somewhat insane turn of events, and I’ve never seen this happen to a GC contender in a grand tour.
Key Takeaways
1) Remco Evenepoel is by far the strongest rider at this Vuelta
With a dominant, near 30-second effort to take the race’s first uphill stage, Evenepoel showed that he is continuing to add skills to his toolbox (patience to wait until the final 300 meters to attack and the ability to finish it off) and is without-a-doubt the strongest rider currently at this race.
Even just 12 months ago, it would be difficult to imagine Evenepoel sitting calmly in the front group, letting his rivals reel in attacks (sometimes from their own teammates) before launching a winning move from an elite group in the sprint finish.
This win, and the tactical/physical improvement it showed, was truly impressive and shows that Evenepoel has the physical ability to challenge, and beat, the world’s best GC riders on big mountain stages in grand tours.
2) However, unless he can open up massive time gains through the opening week, it is difficult to imagine him holding onto his lead in the third week
Despite how good he looked today, the question was never how good Evenepoel would be through the opening week.
At the last three grand tours he has started, he has come in incredibly hot and moped the floor at every opportunity.
But, after those opening weeks, the results are mixed.
He consistently leaked time to Roglič in the third week of last year’s Vuelta before the defending champion crashed out on stage 16.
And, in this year’s Giro d’Italia, he was dropped by Roglič on stage 8 after looking unbeatable in the opening time trial.
My take is that while the race already appears to be over due to Evenepoel’s incredible form, his near-constant emotional outbursts following each stage, and the significant blow to his head (he appeared to be wobbly on his feet after his post-stage crash today), will leave him unable to continue this dominance over the next three weeks.
It would be more than fair to disagree with this take, but history shows that grand tours are rarely won by riders spending significant emotional energy outside of the race and who suffer blows to their head.
3) The Jumbo-Visma leaders might look off their best, but this is in line with their highly successful grand tour slow-build strategy
On the other end of the spectrum, Jumbo-Visma, particularly three-time Vuelta winner Roglič, appears slightly off their best at the moment.
In seasons past, it would have been difficult to imagine Roglič failing to win a reduced bunch uphill finish early in a great tour.
However, if we actually crunch the numbers, in his last two grand tour appearances, Roglič has bucked the trend of coming in with incredible fitness and racking up early time bonuses and instead has favored slow builds with strong third weeks.
2022 Vuelta: He surrendered 2’41 to Evenepoel through the first ten stages of racing before clawing back 1’15 in just two third-week mountain stages.
2023 Giro: Roglič ceded 29 seconds to Geraint Thomas through the first 18 stages before clawing 43 seconds on Thomas in two third-week stages.
It might ‘feel’ like he is going the wrong direction, but the fact that he has limited his losses to the TTT, and an 11-second gap on today’s uphill finish is a massive improvement to his performance against Evenepoel early in this year’s Giro and last year’s Vuelta.
Additionally, while Jonas Vingegaard ceded 4 seconds to Evenepoel on the stage, he has given up early time to GC rivals in both Tours de France that he won and looked better than expected for a rider without any specific prep for this race.
The fact that he will likely only improve as the race goes on (source: the last two Tours de France), means that he should most likely be considered the rider to beat, despite his early time losses.
4) Jumbo-Visma and UAE will have to execute well-defined plans to overcome the quiet, but significant, time losses they have racked up through the first three stages
Even with recent history on their side, the fact that the Jumbo duo won’t be able to lean on chipping away at Evenepoel’s lead via time bonuses means they will have to recalculate their GC plan.
If they can’t simply work to pull back the breakaway before allowing Roglič to sweep up bonuses, they will have to work on making the race as hard as possible before using their extremely strong team to crack Evenepoel on the race’s lone Tour de France-esque mountain stage (stage 13 over the Aubisque and Tourmalet).
The fact that they haven’t been able to count on Roglič racking up a massive bonus second advantage on his rivals at grand tours since 2021, and that they have won the last two Tours with a strategy identical to the one outlined above bodes well for their ability to successfully challenge Evenepoel for the win.
On the flip side, if they can’t coordinate their tactics on climbs and continue to close down each other’s moves like we saw today, they will nullify their numerical advantage and find themselves unable to crack their GC rivals on major mountain stages.
The other major GC contenders, the UAE duo of Almeida/Ayuso, are stuck with a significant time deficit on Evenepoel without any real track record of successfully engineering big-picture winning grand tour tactics.
Like Jumbo, their early time losses have been quiet but large.
Being over half a minute down on Evenepoel without being dropped by him is far from ideal.
And, considering their UAE team has appeared to consistently struggle tactically and that Tadej Pogačar’s two Tour wins were mainly won by having their star rider riding everyone off his wheel on big mountain stages, it starts to look like if Ayuso is going to have a winning ride here, he can’t lean on team strategy and will have to rely on dropping Roglič/Evenepoel/Roglič/Mas on the major mountain stages while at least matching them in the time trial.
5) The stage continued to highlight the surge of youth, and decline of major veterans, in modern pro cycling
The growing dominance of young riders was on display today when three 20-year-olds, Cian Uijtdebroeks, Juan Ayuso, and Lenny Martinez, finished inside the top eight, and all currently sit in strong GC positions.
Meanwhile, the 33-year-old Mikel Landa and 37-year-old Geraint Thomas were well off the pace and already look out of contention for the GC.
Stage 4 Preview
Tomorrow’s 185-kilometer stage from Andorra back to Catalonia, which essentially backtracks today’s, is one of the few opportunities for the sprinters present at this Vuelta, and, as a result, will likely end in a bunch sprint.
While plenty of riders will look to get into the breakaway, and the QuickStep team of Evenepoel will want it to stay clear in order to get rid of the responsibilities of the leader’s jersey, it will be difficult to hold off multiple dedicated sprinters’ teams who aren’t yet worn down by the race and know their chances are far and few between to get stage wins here.