Following Saturday’s opening team time trial, the Vuelta a España heads for the hills with a vengeance from stage two onward. But for all the Vuelta has four summit finishes in the next eight days, not everybody is convinced that they will be so decisive for the race’s final outcome.
Team Sky’s sports director Gabriel Rasch, for one, thinks that the hardest demands on the riders will be made in the race’s second week, when the Vuelta tackles the Pyrenees in Andorra’s stage 11, and then makes some daunting incursions into the mountains of northern Spain.
Speaking to Cyclingnews before the start, Rasch said “It’s a race that suits Chris (Froome), a lot of climbing and a long time trial [in the third week] which is good for us.
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“We’ll see how this first week goes. But the second week is super-super hard, with a lot of transfers between stages two, too. That’s where the real tests [of strength] will be.”
As for the first week of the Vuelta, Rasch says that the weather - as usual at this time of year, very hot in the south of Spain - and stages like today’s [Sunday’s] climb to El Caminito del Rey will provide some important, if not decisive, shakeouts amongst the overall contenders.
“I think the days going to Seville and Cordoba will be super-hot, but also stage two’s finish is certainly hotter than it is on the coast. We went to see it [on a training ride] on Thursday [before the Vuelta start], it’s a really hard stage,” said Rasch. “It doesn’t look that hard on paper, but it’s very twisty, up and down, up and down, all the time, and the final climb is a solid four kilometre ascent.
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