As a Vuelta a España heaves into view with perhaps a dozen potential winners in a field of exceptional quality, topped by the Tour de France stars Nairo Quintana, Thibaut Pinot and Vincenzo Nibali, it is hard to believe there was a time when the third Grand Tour of the cycling season looked horribly out on a limb. In 1995, at the instigation of the late Hein Verbruggen, the then president of the UCI, the race was moved from its traditional late April-mid May date to the back end of the season, to a chorus of concerned voices.
As late as 2008 there was still debate over the calendar slot but in recent years it has become clear that Verbruggen had a basically sound idea: the Vuelta could extend a narrative for the cycling season that would naturally peak in July with the Tour de France. It probably helps that the Tour de France has come to be dominated by Team Sky since 2012; Julys now regularly end with a bevy of Grand Tour specialists looking for a new target having failed to knock the British team off their perch. Luckily for them, that target now comes up within four weeks.
When it was held in April, the Vuelta was a largely Spanish affair except when Bernard Hinault or Eddy Merckx dropped in; the Vuelta in September has become far more international – partly because of the cataclysmic decline in elite-level Spanish teams following a plethora of doping scandals – although as one rider put it, in many cases the cyclists who race it “either [don’t] want to be there or they [are] desperate to perform”. That makes it a hugely unpredictable race, as Team Sky found every year up to 2017. Almost every favourite comes accompanied by a caveat.
9 Sep: stage 15
Ribera de Arriba – Lagos de Covadonga (178.2km)
This iconic ascent in the Picos, home to some of the last wolves in Europe, is the third consecutive mountain-top finish in a series that should shape the overall standings before a brutal final week. It is relatively long at 11km and comes after a lumpy stage through Asturias but the previous two days’ climbing are what make it truly tough this year.
11 Sep: stage 16
Santillana del Mar – Torrelavega, time trial (32km)
The only substantial time trial in a Vuelta that is largely for the climbers, this looks pancake flat and will give the few strong time triallists a chance to regain time. A big day for Richie Porte and Rigoberto Urán if they can get here in one piece.
15 Sep: stage 20
Escaldes-Engordany – Col de Gallina (97km)
The grand finale at the end of a short, brutal stage that has six categorised climbs and 4,000m of height gain. The final climb is not super long but the stage itself is brief enough to encourage attacking from the gun. It will be impossible for a team to control so the race could be turned upside down.
With last year’s winner, Chris Froome, absent, along with Geraint Thomas – to the obvious benefit of the Tour of Britain – Quintana, Nibali and the Italian Fabio Aru top the contenders’ list by virtue of the fact that each has already won at least one Grand Tour, or in Nibali’s case all three. However, Nibali has had so little time to get over the broken vertebrae he sustained in the Tour de France that he says he has his eye on the world championship instead, while Quintana and Aru have impressed only in their inconsistency in the last couple of seasons.
Like Nibali, Richie Porte and Rigoberto Urán are looking to redeem their seasons after crashes ruined their Tours de France; Porte has just signed a two-year deal with Trek-Segafredo but he has still to prove he can finish on the podium of a Grand Tour. An attack of gastroenteritis on the eve of the Vuelta has not helped. Pinot is also in search of redemption: the Frenchman rode a strong Giro d’Italia, but fell apart in the final 72 hours, ending up with pneumonia that compromised the middle part of his season. If Quintana falters, Alejandro Valverde may step up, but at 38 he is surely too long in the tooth to repeat his 2009 victory.
Even without Froome or Thomas, there is a serious British contender in the Bury climber Simon Yates, who led the Giro for 13 days this spring but cracked on the penultimate mountain stage. If he can make the leap to overall victory in the Vuelta, it would delight statisticians as, following Froome and Thomas’s wins in the Giro and Tour, this would be the first time the same nation had won all three Grand Tours in the same year with three different cyclists.
The Dutchman Steven Kruijswijk is another credible candidate, having finished fifth in the Tour, but the young Colombian Miguel Ángel López carries more weight, figuratively at least. At 24 he has shown a near-perfect improvement curve since winning the Tour de l’Avenir in 2014; last year at the Vuelta, he took two stage wins, while this season he managed third in the Giro behind Froome and Tom Dumoulin.
It is not only the candidates for the overall win who will be seeking redemption in the next few weeks. The French sprinter Nacer Bouhanni has had a season marred by disputes with his Cofidis team and is in a dire need of a major victory, while the former British champion Steve Cummings has fought ill-health and has been waiting all year for the Dimension Data team to give him a start in a major Tour.
After taking stages in the Tour de France in 2015 and 2016, the Wirral racer was left frustrated when Dimension Data opted to put all their strength behind Mark Cavendish in this year’s Tour, a plan that ultimately came to nothing. Cummings acknowledges this has been a disastrous season for him – as it has for his team – which puts him in precisely the same situation as 2012, when he relaunched his career with a stage victory at Ferrol.
• This article was amended on 27 August 2018 to replace the incorrect “hoves” with “heaves”
