Preview Stages 1-9 Stages 10-15 Stages 16-21 There was plenty of action in the final week of the 2024 Tour de France – but action alone doesn’t hit too hard when there is so little sense of jeopardy. As such, Tadej Pogacar’s dominant victory was a lot more impressive than it was entertaining. Foreshadowing a damp squib The final week began with a third sprint victory for last year’s green jersey winner, Jasper Philipsen, followed by a win from the breakaway for Olympic road race gold medallist, Richard Carapaz, on his way to winning the mountains classification. That second stage also sucke ..read more

It’s time for the annual Tadej Pogacar v Jonas Vingegaard head-to-head. There are however a pair of potential spanners in the works which mean everybody else can dampen their default defeatism a touch this year. The scoreline currently sits at 2-2 between Pogacar and Vingegaard when it comes to Tours de France victories and we have to go back to Egan Bernal in 2019 to find a different winner. “The first of many” everyone agreed when Bernal won – but time was apparently moving on even before he hit a parked bus at 30mph in 2022. (Given that doctors apparently warned there was a 95% chance Berna ..read more

Stages 1-9 Stages 10-15 Stages 16-21 And surprises came there none – not unless you count Tadej Pogacar working his way up to the biggest winning margin in a Grand Tour this century as a surprise (which I’m sensing by this point you probably don’t). Start-stop Tuesday’s Stage 16 was positively awash with tension, excitement and intrigue, with more plot twists than the last half-hour of Wild Things. Where exactly would the stage that Tadej Pogacar was going to win actually start and end? First they lopped the biggest climb – the Stelvio – off because they were worried about avalanches. Then t ..read more

Stages 1-9 Stages 10-15 Well this is all getting a bit processional, isn’t it? Albeit a very rapid, phenomenally exhausting procession. The working week Tadej Pogacar hopped back onto his bike on Tuesday with a 2m40s advantage over second placed Daniel Martinez. When he knocked off on Friday afternoon, the gap was still 2m40s, so I’m not going to bother writing anything else about stages 10 to 13. The time trial The race’s second time trial, on Saturday, stands out as being a day when someone beat Tadej Pogacar. Sure, the sprinters have won stages and there’s been the odd day for the breakaw ..read more

No plot twists so far. And going by the form of Tadej Pogacar, we may very well never get one. The opening weekend This year’s Giro kicked off with a hilly stage and followed that up with the first summit finish. This meant that by the time we hit the working week, Tadej Pogacar already had a 45s advantage over second-placed Geraint Thomas, while familiar names and wannabe contenders such as Romain Bardet, Thymen Arensman and Nairo Quintana were two, four and six minutes back respectively. So it goes. Pogacar was third out of the three-man front group he’d created on Stage 1. He put that right ..read more

Preview Stages 1-9 Stages 10-15 Stages 16-21 A strong, loyal and selfless servant on the crucial days when stage races are won and lost, Sepp Kuss is pretty much exactly what you’d mould if you had the power to shape the perfect team-mate. It was therefore something of a surprise when the two men he helped to victories in this year’s Giro d’Italia and Tour de France went out of their way to try and deny him a Vuelta a Espana title. Sepp Kuss is surely a man you want to keep onside. This, for pretty much everyone, will always be the most memorable moment of the 2023 Vuelta a Espana: Wherea ..read more

Preview Stages 1-9 Stages 10-15 Remco Evenepoel bested all his overall rivals in the Stage 10 time trial and then won Stage 14 in the Pyrenees. If it weren’t for the small matter of shipping 27 minutes on Stage 13 in between those two triumphs, it would have been a pretty good week for last year’s Vuelta a Espana winner. That grim stage for Remco featured the greatest density of climbing of any Grand Tour day this year – 4,000m in just 135km. There have been longer mountain stages and there have been stages with more height gain, but none where so much ascending has been packed into so sho ..read more

Preview Stages 1-9 I’m already a day late with this, so the time trial will have happened by the time you’re reading it. Let’s ignore that for the time being and instead make some sort of effort to sum up the first nine days of racing in this year’s Vuelta a Espana. I’d normally do a fuller recap, but the race has been a bit rambling and confusing, so it seems to make more sense to pick out a few events and themes that hopefully explain where we are better than a blow-by-blow account would. This was the top 10 on the first rest day. Let’s work our way back from that. And these are the thi ..read more

Until the racing or an abandonment or two tell us otherwise, we can keep this very simple. The main contenders for the 2023 Vuelta a Espana are the guy who won it last year; the guy who won the three before that; and the guy who’s won the last two Tours de France. I will throw a few other names into the mix lower down though because there’s a pretty strong field. Remco Evenepoel – the guy who it last time Foto Fabio Ferrari / LaPresse If you only normally follow the Tour de France, you’ll have no real clue who Remco Evenepoel is because he’s never raced it. The plan was to win the Vuelta last ..read more

Preview Stages 1-9 Stages 10-15 Stages 16-21 Jonas Vingegaard’s average daily time gain over Tadej Pogacar over the first two weeks of this year’s Tour de France was less than half a second. He improved on this rather dramatically over the next two days. While the Dane was frequently second by seconds, by the end of three weeks he was first by minutes. As I said last week, the shape of this race was Pogacar reliably gaining seconds with his faster finish, while Vingegaard waited for opportunities to attack earlier in the day with a view to perhaps gaining minutes. It was death by a thousand ..read more