Quite what Chris Froome (Team Sky) made of losing half a minute to his principal rivals for the red jersey on the Vuelta a España’s first true mountaintop finish at La Alpujarra was anyone’s guess. He wasn’t saying.
The Tour de France winner lost contact with the group of favourites with a little over a kilometre to go and came home in 17th place on the stage, losing 27 seconds to the red jersey group and a further seven to Fabio Aru (Astana), whose attack had precipitated his unexpected travails.
Froome performed a prompt U-turn on crossing the line and descended towards his team bus down the mountain without making any declarations to the reporters gathered in the finish area. It was instead left to Nicolas Roche, once again Sky’s most effervescent performer, to downplay the importance of Froome’s losses in the first major rendezvous of this Vuelta, which see him slip to 12th overall, 1:22 off the leader.
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“No, I’m not alarmed,” Roche told reporters outside a Team Sky van a couple of hundred yards past the finish line. “I think tonight he’ll be a bit grumpy and it’s only normal but he knows how to ride and he knows himself very well. We’ve seen him many times have a bad day but not lose too much time and take it day by day and recover. This is the first one and there are many, many, many more to come, and harder stages too, so if he lost 10, 20 or 30 seconds today it’s not the end of the world.”
Roche finished safely in the red jersey group at the top of the 18km climb, which was tackled in soaring temperatures, to maintain his 4th place on general classification, just 36 seconds behind Esteban Chaves (Orica-GreenEdge). The Irishman explained that he was not made aware of Froome’s difficulties until after the stage, but felt there was precious little help he or Mikel Nieve could have offered their leader at that late juncture.
“We didn’t get any instruction at that stage. Mikel and I were trying to fight on the front there and we stayed focused all the way to the end,” Roche said. “Froomey knows how to ride his own pace. Sometimes, with the way he rides by keeping his pace and then suddenly completely accelerating in his high cadence mode in the last kilometre, it’s better not to have someone wait with him.
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