Romain Bardet (AG2R La Mondiale) smiles a little wryly when he is asked to evaluate how his first ever Vuelta a España has worked out for him, given that it's been a long, difficult learning curve since he and the race left Nimes nearly three weeks ago.
Bardet has been in some good mountain breaks, like on the stage to Calar Alto, where he placed fifth as well as a fourth place in Andorra la Vella. He was also with Alberto Contador's long-distance move to Sierra Nevada.
But the possibility of a GC bid, touted by team manager Vincent Lavenu to Cyclingnews at Nimes, evaporated before the end of the first week and Bardet, having crashed in the time trial in Logroño, is now 19th overall.
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The possibility of a stage win remains in the last two days of mountain climbing, but Julien Jurdie's observation of "where there's life, there's hope," when asked how he rates Bardet's chances of success, does not sound overly gung-ho.
Third in the Tour de France, Bardet gives his usual articulate, detailed kind of response to how he believes he's got on in his first ever Vuelta a España, and admits that he perhaps had underestimated the difficulty of the race. However, in his defence, given he didn't know what he was letting himself in for, that's hardly to be considered an error on his part; this was a voyage in the dark and his big goal, as he said beforehand, was more .
"I don't want to hide anything. It's been a really hard experience, because maybe I wasn't prepared for that," Bardet told Cyclingnews at the start of stage 18. "It's my first ever Vuelta and I didn't know exactly how good I can be after the Tour.
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