Tejay van Garderen entered the final week of the Tour de France with his end goal, a place on the final podium in Paris, firmly within his reach, only for an untimely respiratory infection to nudge it beyond his grasp once again.
As van Garderen wheeled to a halt on the road to Pra-Loup on stage 17 and the door of the BMC car yawned open, he was faced with the existential crisis familiar to so many in that position over the years. What next?
In the short-term, the next stop on van Garderen’s itinerary was recovery on the couch at his European base in Nice, where he was at least able to bring himself to watch the remainder of the Tour – "Those final stages looked brutal," he said – before flying to his home in Colorado to resume training.
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At that juncture, van Garderen’s intention was to resume competitive action on home roads at the USA Pro Challenge, but with some gentle encouragement from his team, he talked himself around to lining out at the Vuelta a España instead.
"The team gave me the option. I could sense that they wanted me to do the Vuelta but I was saying no, I wanted to do Colorado but then I got back home, I looked at the course profiles and spoke with my wife," van Garderen told Cyclingnews as he took shelter from the early evening sun ahead of the pre-race presentation in Benahavis on Friday.
"Having looked at the profile, the Vuelta looked like it suited me pretty well with the TT and everything, and sometimes it’s good just to keep it fresh. The past five seasons have been almost exactly the same, so this is my first time on the Vuelta since 2010, my neo-pro season. It’s almost like going full circle, and I’m excited just to change things up a bit."
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