Remco Evenepoel wins in red as breakaway survivor Robert Gesink cruelly denied on Stage 18 at La Vuelta
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Updated 08/09/2022 at 18:04 GMT
Remco Evenepoel strengthened his grip on the red jersey with a superb Stage 18 win on the Alto del Piornal ahead of his closest rival Enric Mas. The two strongest riders of this Vuelta reeled in lone leader Robert Gesink in the last few hundred metres to deny the Dutch veteran the win on a day Australia’s Jay Vine crashed out to hand the polka dot jersey to Richard Carapaz.
Stage 18 highlights: Evenepoel wins in red
No gifts. With Robert Gesink closing in on a morale-boosting win for his Jumbo-Visma team following the withdrawal of leader Primoz Roglic, Remco Evenepoel (Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl) had other ideas. His big rival Enric Mas (Movistar) hot on his heels, the Belgian race leader surged past Gesink on the home straight to win Stage 18 on the Alto del Piornal and extend his lead in the general classification with just three days remaining.
Evenepoel had traded blows with Spain’s Mas all the way up the final climb of the 190km stage to reel in all but the last-man standings from an initial 43-man breakaway that at one moment had an advantage of nine minutes over the pack.
An exciting counter-attack from Portugal’s Joao Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) with 90km still remaining ultimately sounded the death-knell for the breakaway, with the resulting accelerations behind resulting in the race coming back together on the third and final categorised climb of the day.
Here, Gesink extricated himself from six-man lead group that also included the double stage winner Richard Carapaz (Ineos Grenadiers), Frenchmen Thibaut Pinot (Groupama-FDJ) and Elie Gesbert (Arkea-Samsic), Colombian champion Sergio Higuita (Bora-Hansgrohe) and Britain’s Hugh Carthy (EF Education-EasyPost).
As the GC riders tore strips off each other behind to neutralise the remnants of the break and bring Almeida’s brave move to heel, Gesink rode clear in pursuit of a career second stage win on the Vuelta – six years after the first. The rangy Dutch veteran came so close to glory – but was left wishing the finish had come a few hundred metres earlier.
Sniffing out an opportunity to take a prestigious win in red – and to perhaps put the GC battle to bed – Evenepoel danced clear with Mas to close up the gap on Gesink. The trio rode together for a brief moment as the road flattened out before Evenepoel inevitably used his superior kick to drop his rivals and take a famous win.
“It’s a new achievement in my life,” Evenepoel said afterwards while cooling down. “It was a pretty tough stage with some hard climbs in the final – especially with those early attacks from UAE Team Emirates and [Joao] Almeida.
“But we always stayed calm – that’s what I learned the most, to always stay climb. It’s like in the last kilometre when we were still twenty seconds from Gesink – and in the end we came to him with three-hundred metres remaining and I went at two-hundred because I knew it was quite flat. It paid off.”
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Evenepoel basks in 'most perfect day ever' after Stage 18 victory
The 22-year-old said that he had not intended to compete for the win until the opportunity arose on the second ascent of the Alto del Piornal.
“The goal is always to try and let the breakaway go – because then the bonifications are gone. But when I went with Enric [Mas] at the end, it made it click and I told myself, ‘Now you go for the stage as well,’ because winning on a mountain-top finish in the red jersey is a really amazing thing.
“Enric is a really fairplay guy – in the end we worked together to go for the stage win. He also wanted to try and go, but it was a sprint and it was a perfect day for me. The most perfect day ever.”
Evenepoel now leads Mas by 2’07” with three stages remaining, with Spain’s Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) competing the provisional podium at 5’14”. Colombia’s Miguel Angel Lopez (Astana-Qazaqstan) edged ahead of Spanish champion Carlos Rodriguez (Ineos Grenadiers) in the top five after the latter was the victim of a nasty crash early in the stage.
Bandaged and bloodied, Rodriguez was eventually paced home by team-mate Carapaz after the Ecuadorian was caught on the final climb and denied the chance to win a third stage. Carapaz is the new polka dot jersey following the withdrawal of Australia’s Jay Vine of Alpecin-Deceuninck, who injured his wrist badly in the same high-speed pile-up that marred the start of the stage.
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The pile-up that ended Jay Vine's (far left) race and also took down Mads Pedersen and Carlos Rodriguez during Stage 18 of La Vuelta 2022
Image credit: Getty Images
It was in the wake of the crash that the day’s breakaway finally formed after a fast and furious opening 40km of racing. The move included some big-name riders in the form of double Vuelta champion Vincenzo Nibali (Astana-Qazaqstan), the 2020 Giro d’Italia champion Tao Geoghegan Hart (Ineos Grenadiers) and no fewer than five EF Education-EasyPost riders, no doubt buoyed by Rigoberto Uran’s victory 24 hours earlier.
With the gap stretching to nine minutes, Almeida broke clear of the peloton alongside UAE team-mate Brandon McNulty ahead of the Cat.3 Alto de le Desespera, which Carapaz – the virtual polka dot jersey following Vine’s withdrawal – crested in pole position.
Almeida’s quest was given fresh impetus by team-mates Ivo Oliveira and Marc Soler dropping back to help him with the chase. But when Nibali dropped back on the first ascent of the Alto del Piornal, Astana applied the pressure alongside Movistar behind in the red jersey group.
Carthy had attacked from the breakaway first with 50km remaining, the winner on the Angliru from 2020 joined by Higuita and Pinot, and then by Gesink, Gesbert and Carapaz ahead of the summit. Olympic champion Carapaz took the points over the top to consolidate his polka dot lead, but the sextet’s lead came down to under two minutes ahead of the final climb.
The western side of the Piornal was something of a free-for-all once the disparate groups hit its gentle six per cent slopes – and the pendulum swung in many directions as Gesbert attacked and Gesink countered, all while the GC riders battled behind.
Mas put in multiple attacks but was left frustrated by Evenepoel, who himself stretched his legs in between moves from the likes of Ben O’Connor (Ag2R-Citroen) and Lopez (Astana). Gesink looked to benefit from the indecision and lack of cohesion behind – but once Evenepoel had a sniff of glory, the Belgian could not resist pushing for the win.
“It was a great race until the last two-hundred metres,” Gesink said afterward. The 36-year-old admitted that it took him 24 hours to reset following team-mate Roglic’s withdrawal, which hit him badly.
“Today was really good,” he said. “I was happy to do this, to be there, but I would have been slightly happier if I had won. But that’s life – and I might need a few days to recover after this one.”
The race continues on Friday with the intriguing Stage 19 – a short 133km ride with two ascents of the Puerto del Pielago ahead of a long downhill ride to the finish. It is followed by a tough final showdown in the Guardarrama mountain range west of Madrid on Saturday.
“It's still not done – still one more really hard stage,” a focused Evenepoel said after taking another step towards his maiden Grand Tour win. “They will for sure attack me, but maybe now it’s more easy to control it because I feel my legs are really good. So, this is very good for me and my team for the last few days.”
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