Everything, all at once
Stage 20 was the race’s only Categoría Especial finish and its last argument: 187 km from La Calahorra with over 5,000 metres of Sierra Nevada climbing — the 20% ramps of Hazallanas taken twice around El Purche, then the Collado del Alguacil, its final 8.3 km at nearly 10% with pitches of 22%. The day began at full volume: Wout van Aert attacking to seed a 14-rider breakaway, crosswinds forcing Movistar to shepherd the red jersey before the first climb, and a 50-rider counterattack — half the surviving race — trying and failing to bridge. After Peñas Blancas’ stalemate, nobody wanted to die wondering. With 2:15 between Enric Mas and Primož Roglič, everything was still, technically, possible.
Vintage Landa
Out of the break, on the last climb, came a ghost of the 2010s. Mikel Landa — 36, winless through the worst season of his career, reportedly bound for Euskaltel-Euskadi next year in a farewell homecoming — rode away from Tobias Halland Johannessen, then broke Ramses Debruyne with a single acceleration 7 km from the summit, and climbed the Alguacil’s exposed upper ramps entirely alone while the gap kept opening. Landa by 47 seconds over Johannessen, 1:27 over Debruyne, with Urko Berrade and Jan Hirt distant. The Basque hillsides have a word for what that looked like — Landismo, the beautiful, doomed, long-range climbing that has cost him as many races as it won — except this time it wasn’t doomed. A queen stage, at 36, in what may be his last Grand Tour for a WorldTour team. The mountain owed him one.
Kuss goes long, Mas goes nowhere — which was the point
Behind the break, the GC exploded early: Sepp Kuss and Richard Carapaz attacked on El Purche, and while Carapaz’s move faded, Kuss’s became a full long-range raid — the American gained more than five minutes on the favourites and vaulted six places into the top five, a vintage flying-Kuss day with his Visma team-mates ferrying him forward. And at the centre of it all, the man with everything to lose did the hardest thing in cycling: nothing, perfectly. Roglič attacked and got no gap that mattered; Felix Gall clawed back 17 seconds on the steepest ramps; Mas simply did not crack. The final classification, bar the Granada circuit: Mas; Roglič at 2:15; Gall at 2:44; Carapaz at 6:54; Kuss at 8:44. The jersey Mas inherited the day Pogačar hit a rock outside Xeraco he has since defended on the Aitana, Calar Alto, the Pandera, Peñas Blancas and now the Alguacil. Nobody hands you a Grand Tour. They only hand you the chance to lose one, daily, for two weeks.
What Sunday means
Tomorrow’s finale is no processional: five laps of a Granada circuit crossing a kilometre of cobbles at 7.3% below the Alhambra. But 2:15 doesn’t fall off a wheel on a circuit, and so, barring genuine disaster, Enric Mas — second in this race three times — will become the first Spanish winner of the Vuelta since Alberto Contador in 2014. Twelve years of home crowds applauding other people’s champions, ended by the man Spanish cycling had half-resigned itself to calling nearly. The three-times runner-up, champion at last, in Granada, under the Alhambra. Scripts this good usually get rejected for being too neat.
In the grupetto
Five thousand metres of climbing on day 20 is the autobus’s Everest, and the time cut on a stage won at Landa’s pace is no joke: the laughing group stopped laughing on the second Hazallanas and ground it out on arithmetic and fumes. The grupetto’s ovation tonight is split three ways — for Landa, who was one of them all season and reminded everyone what he used to be; for Kuss, who animated a stage that could have been a procession; and for every heavy-legged survivor who made the cut with the party in Granada one sleep away. One hundred and forty-odd made it through the Sierra Nevada. All of them finish this Vuelta tomorrow.
Moral of the story
Roglič needed two minutes and attacked to get them; Gall needed less and took seconds; Kuss needed nothing and took five minutes; and the man who took the least — nothing at all — won the most. The grupetto’s moral: a Grand Tour’s last mountain rewards two kinds of rider: the one with nothing to lose, and the one who refuses to lose anything. Landa and Mas, the same lesson from opposite ends. Granada tomorrow. Bring a flag.
