More than ten years after he turned pro and in the latest upturn to his rollercoaster career, Robert Gesink (LottoNL-Jumbo) finally celebrated a Grand Tour stage win at the 2016 Vuelta a Espana's stage 14 mountain stage atop Aubisque.
Gesink has taken stage wins at races as prestigious as the Tour de Suise and Tour of California (twice), but a Grand Tour stage victory has always eluded the Dutch rider, right up to when he was narrowly defeated by Nairo Quintana last week at the Lagos de Covadonga.
The 30-year-old finally got the result he was looking for on the Aubisque, with a courageous ascent of the French Hors Categorie climb, forming part of the early break then bridging across to a group of late attackers; Kenny Elissonde (FDJ), Egor Sillin (Katusha) and New Zealand team-mate George Bennett.
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The stage then came down to a three-way duel between Ellisonde, Gesink and Sillin and the Dutch rider did it the hard way, attacking from the front with 400 metres to go.
Hammering away at the pedals, Gesink managed to open up a narrow but decisive gap to claim the win. Victory in itself would have been sweet enough after a ten-year wait. But on top of that, as Gesink had pointed out to Cyclingnews earlier in the race, in this year's Vuelta there was also the major challenge of his overcoming a difficult period of concussion and injury - something he did in style on Saturday.
"This is really special, it's been a hard year this year, nothing really worked out. I crashed in Suisse" - suffering a bad concussion "and I couldn't train for a long time, and that meant no GC in the Vuelta. But I wanted to do a Grand Tour for stages one time, too," Gesink said.
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