Key Takeaways: Vuelta a España Stage 6
Breaking down how one of the most exciting and significant grand tour stages of the year was won and how it will affect the remainder of the race
Following an opening five stages where they faced questions about their supposed supremacy, Jumbo-Visma struck back with a tactically perfect ride that saw Sepp Kuss rocket up the GC standings after smartly getting into a massive 40-rider breakaway and winning the sixth stage of the 2023 Vuelta a España atop the brutal climb to the Javalambre Observatory. Behind, the 20-year-old Frenchman Lenny Martinez took the race lead by a slim 8-second margin over Kuss, fighting hard to come in second on the stage 26 seconds later.
Outside of delivering a stage win, Kuss’ presence in the breakaway forced the Soudal-QuickStep of former race leader Remco Evenepoel to set a fast and furious pace heading into the final climb to keep the time gap from getting out of hand and handing the overall win to Kuss. This pace fatigued the GC contenders and set up an eventual attack from Primož Roglič, who rode clear of the rest of the contenders after being joined by his teammate Jonas Vingegaard, to drop Evenepoel and take back a significant chunk of time that saw them being to reverse their time losses from the opening few stages of racing.
Stage Top Three:
1) Sepp Kuss (Jumbo) +0
2) Lenny Martinez (FDJ) +26
3) Romain Bardet (DSM) +31
Current GC Top Five:
1) Lenny Martinez (FDJ) +0
2) Sepp Kuss (Jumbo) +8
3) Marc Soler (UAE) +51
4) Wout Poels (Bahrain) +1’41
5) Steff Cras (TotalEnergies) +1’48
Key GC Stage Time Gaps:
Kuss +0
Carthy: lost 1’46
Roglic: lost 3’02
Vingegaard: lost 3’02
Ayuso: lost 3’09
Almeida: lost 3’16
Uijtdebroeks: lost 3’16
Mas: lost 3’26
Evenepoel: lost 3’34
Vlasov: lost 3’44
Thomas: lost 4’27
Filtered GC Standings:
2) Sepp Kuss (Jumbo) +8
9) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +2’47
10) Enric Mas (Movistar) +2’50
11) Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo) +2’52
12) Primož Roglič +2’58
13) Hugh Carthy +3’03
14) Juan Ayuso +3’06
15) Cian Uijtdebroeks +3’08
16) João Almeida +3’17
18) Aleksandr Vlasov +3’36
23) Geraint Thomas +4’57
Stage 6 Race Notebook:
85.1km-to-go: As soon as TV coverage begins, we see a massive 40-rider breakaway has ripped off the front of the peloton. It includes multiple riders close in the GC, and has four Jumbo-Visma riders, including Sepp Kuss, who is just 55 seconds off the race lead of Evenepoel. Knowing they can severely stress Evenepoel and his QuickStep team by getting Kuss as far up the road as possible, they deploy their support riders to drive a hard pace at the front of the race and open up a precarious seven-minute gap.
66.km-40.5km: The gap ballooning out to such a large gap forces QuickStep to use their team to set a hard pace in the peloton (except two of their riders, who are up in the breakaway). Enric Mas’ Movistar team joins them, and, somewhat oddly, Ineos. This brings the gap down to a reasonable four minutes with 40km-to-go.
10.8km: However, on the run-in to the tough final climb, the peloton’s progress stalls, and Kuss’ breakaway hits the lower slopes with a near four-minute advantage.
7.5km: As the peloton begins the climb, the Jumbo GC leaders, Primož Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard, are sitting in the bunch while Movistar and QuickStep are being forced to set a hard pace on the front. Just like stage 5 of the recent Tour de France, Jumbo is betting that forcing a rival GC team to set an all-day hard pace leading into a final climb while they sit in will benefit them.
3.3km: Up front, Kuss is still sitting in the group while Movistar’s Einer Rubio has built up a near 20-second gap after an earlier attack, Kuss lays down a massive attack that sees him almost immediately pulverize Rubio’s gap.
3km: Back in the peloton, Jumbo kicks off phase two of its stage plan by having Roglič attack. This attack raises the pace and almost immediately sees Evenepoel isolated.
2.9km: UAE’s Juan Ayuso increases the pace to chase down Roglič, while, unlike stage 3, Jumbo is leveraging its numerical advantage by sitting on Ayuso’s wheel and getting a relatively ‘free’ ride. Behind, Evenepoel is unable to respond to the surge and is being dropped.
2.6km: Evenepoel (#1) loses significant time quickly, but unlike Geraint Thomas (#31), he doesn’t look particularly bad and is still turning the pedals over with a smooth pedal stroke.
1.5km: Roglič and Vingegaard, with Enric Mas on their wheel as the only rider capable of matching their pace, catch their teammate Attila Valter, who has dropped back from the breakaway. Considering Valter was able to perform important pace-setting work for Kuss all day, and now can pace his two GC leaders later on the same stage, this is an incredible display of coordinated teamwork from Jumbo.
Kuss Finish: Kuss, thrilled to take the stage win, takes time to high-five fans before he crosses the finish line, despite being in a tight battle for the race lead with Lenny Martinez, who is chasing just behind.
Martinez Finish: Martinez crosses the line right in front of Romain Bardet 26 seconds behind Kuss, to take the overall race lead by 8 seconds.
Roglic/Vingegaard 175m: Roglič’s pace has dropped Mas and has Vingegaard on the limit on his wheel and unable to pull through to help. Ayuso, who has recovered after being dropped earlier, is putting in an impressive ride to chase back on.
Roglic/Vingegaard Finish: The Jumbo duo crosses the finish line 2’52 behind Kuss, and seven seconds ahead of Ayuso.
Evenepoel Finish: Evenepoel, after recovering incredibly well, surges through the final kilometer, nearly catching a fading Mas, to come over the finish line 32-seconds behind Vingegaard/Roglič, which is actually less than the gap the Jumbo riders opened with their initial attack, showing he rode the final kilometer faster.
Key Takeaways
1) Jumbo-Visma used their superior numbers and strength to ride QuickStep and Remco Evenepoel into a perfectly-laid trap
Prior to the race, there was significant chatter regarding Jumbo-Visma’s impressive overall team strength and a plethora of GC options. However, how they would actually deploy this superior overall strength to hurt equally strong GC contenders wasn’t made quite as clear.
But, this stage was a perfect case study for how a strong team with multiple GC options can be used to ‘pinch’ their rivals and set up a situation where they have no choice but to burn their resources chasing all day and allowing them to sit in.
For example, while Quickstep could have, in theory, sat back and allowed the Kuss breakaway to rack up a massive 10+ minute gap prior to the final climb before setting a hard pace in an effort to keep more riders around Evenepoel and avoid falling into the trap of fatiguing their own team leader to help Jumbo, this likely would have resulted in Kuss taking so much time that they wouldn’t have been able to overcome the deficit and would have allowed Kuss to grab a race-winning advantage.
This might not have been ideal for Roglič and Vingegaard personally, but they would still prefer their teammate to have a massive advantage that would force Evenepoel to race aggressively, than not.
In reality, once Kuss was up the road with multiple Jumbo teammates, QuickStep had to burn their resources chasing.
But, just like stage 5 of the 2023 Tour de France, where Jai Hindley acted as their proxy teammate, this strategy of sending an outside GC rider up the road to force a hard chase only worked because their GC leaders, in this case Roglič and Vingegaard, are the strongest climbers in the race.
2) Sepp Kuss was finally paid back for his hugely important teamwork duties and now has the opportunity to act as a major GC wrinkle
The 28-year-old American, acting as the perfect joker card for Jumbo, played the breakaway to perfection to get his third career grand tour stage win and launch himself into a semi-serious GC position.
Being the strongest climber in the breakaway was a positive due to the stage finishing atop a long, brutal climb, but it also made things difficult for Kuss since everyone in the front group wasn’t going to pull any attacks back for fear of losing to Kuss.
This meant Kuss had to play things conservatively on the final climb by sitting back and allowing another rider, Rubio, to attack and build up an advantage, which deterred attacks from the chase group and kept the pace fairly high, and save his race-winning attack until he was close enough to the finish line that he knew he could finish off the strong solo move (i.e. the exact opposite of how Thibaut Pinot rode on the final climb of stage 13 at the 2023 Giro, which Rubio oddly enough won).
And, outside of getting the stage win, Kuss’ massive time gains, which has him nearly three minutes up on Evenepoel, means he will become a GC concern for non-Jumbo teams/riders.
While he will likely lose 1.5-2 minutes in the stage 10 time trial, it won’t be easy for Ayuso, Mas, and Evenepoel to take back the remaining minute, considering he is a better climber than them.
The only big question is how Jumbo will handle having three GC contenders, especially when we get to the multiple big mountain days, like stage 13 in the Pyrenees, and need Kuss to set a hard pace/control attacks to dislodge their main rivals.
3) A few major issues of Remco Evenepoel and his QuickStep team’s GC campaign were exposed throughout the stage
While the raw time loss might not have been extraordinary, and Evenepoel still has a slight advantage on his biggest rivals due to a strong opening team time trial, today’s stage laid bare two major issues with his quest to defend his Vuelta title.
The first is that it is clear his QuickStep team is one of the weakest GC squads at this race.
This was exposed today due to the fact that they allowed a 40-rider move, which included multiple GC threats, to roll clear and struggled to peg back the move to the extent where the time gains at the finish line were negligible.
This issue will only continue, and perhaps compound, as the mountain stages get more difficult and complex in the race’s second week.
The second is that Remco Evenepoel simply isn’t as good of a climber as Roglič and Vingegaard.
While he can match, and sometimes top, them on days early in grand tours with single climbs, we now have enough of a body of evidence of Evenepoel struggling on multiple mountain stages, particularly on stages with an extremely hard pace prior to the climb, to know that we should expect him to continue to leak time through the coming mountain stages.
Add in the fact that the team is rumored to be struggling with a mysterious GI bug, and the path to overall victory starts to look more and more difficult.
4) This Vuelta is exposing the deep well of fast-rising young GC talent in the sport
Lenny Martinez, the Frenchman at just 20 years old, became the youngest rider in the history of the race to the race lead after an incredible opening six stages.
Cian Uijtdebroeks, the 20-year-old Belgian on Bora, put in an incredible ride to finish just behind João Almeida and Juan Ayuso, and ahead of Enric Mas and Remco Evenepoel, to move into a strong GC position in his first career grand tour.
Juan Ayuso, the 20-year-old on UAE, proved to be the best of the rest by being the only rider capable of finishing remotely close to the Roglič/Vingegaard duo and is proving that his third-place overall last year was no fluke and that he should be considered one of the top non-Jumbo contenders for overall victory.
5) Ultimately, today was bad news for any GC contender that isn’t Primož Roglič or Jonas Vingegaard
While the hectic and action-packed stage produced a lot of talking points, and created massive GC time gaps, nobody should be under the illusion that the day benefitted anyone more than Primož Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard, who proved that when the climbs get tough, they are the two strongest riders at the race, and that it is difficult to imagine the overall win being taken by anyone else.
With the route only getting tougher from here, and hard climbs littering the road to Madrid, the fact that they are the strongest on these climbs will heavily favor them.
Interestingly, Vingegaard, the heavy pre-race favorite, appeared unable to pull through and struggled on his teammate’s wheel through the final kilometers of the stage.
This could be read as a positive sign for Roglič’s chances of overall victory, but it is important to remember that Vingegaard was consistently struggling to stay with Tadej Pogačar on multiple occasions through the first 13 stages of the Tour (he lost time on stages 6, 9, & 13 on uphill finishes) before unleashing a race-winning ride in the third week (he hasn’t lost time a GC rival in the third week of a grand tour in his career as a GC leader).
Stage 7 Preview
Tomorrow’s 203-kilometer stage takes the peloton from the remote highlands of Valencia back to the Mediterranean Sea and will likely serve as a much-needed respite from brutal GC racing and set up a straight-forward and tranquillo sprint stage in the Olivia.
The only thing that could potentially produce a wrinkle are crosswinds along the coast in the final 78 kilometers. However, with riders and teams reportedly suffering from illness and few teams having the strength to execute breaking up the peloton, I don’t expect racing of any significance until the final few kilometers of the day.
And, with Kaden Groves’ Alpecin team proving to be the sport’s dominant sprint leadout squad, it is difficult to imagine anyone topping them.
Great analysis for a great stage. If only we could watch from km 0
What about Remco and Ayuso losing key helpers?