Nine months ago during the Vuelta a Espana route presentation, when the 'sharks-tooth' mountain profile of the Andorra stage flashed up on the big screen, longstanding Movistar manager Eusebio Unzue did not beat around the bush. Rather he told Cyclingnews it was "the hardest stage I have ever seen in a Grand Tour" in what he believed, too, to be the hardest ever Vuelta route on record.
Fast forward to September, and with less than 24 hours to go before stage 11's relentless mountain trek through Andorra, nobody has yet publicly disagreed with Unzue's analysis.
In fact, as the Vuelta peloton has ticked off stage after stage on the long haul up from the Porto Banus start to the Pyrenees, there's been an increasing sense of trepidation about stage 11's six classified climbs and roughly 5,000 vertical metres of climbing. That's all packed into 138 kilometres, making it easily the 2015 Vuelta's shortest stage except for the largely ceremonial final stage into Madrid and what would be, as the crow flies, a risibly short distance. However, when you realise the peloton will spend all of their time on Wednesday either climbing or descending during those 138 kilometres, the stage in Andorra suddenly becomes very different, and for most Grand Tours, very unusual.
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As one of Unzue's star pupils, Alejandro Valverde put it in his rest day press conference, "[Wednesday's] stage is really impressive, a really hard one even if you're at 100 per cent."
"Also, after a rest day we all know that the body reacts quite unpredictably, even more so after a long transfer yesterday [Monday], going to bed late, and resting at high altitude, which is not ideal for your body. Many things will affect everyone's performance tomorrow."
There have been harder Vuelta stages in terms of vertical climbing, like the notoriously hard 2009 stage to Velefique, won by Ryder Hesjedal. That stage had a total of 6,500 metres, 2,000 more than in a 'normal' Tour de France high mountain stage. [That year, incidentally, the race was won by Valverde.]
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