Summit Ambition

With nine summit finishes and a testing third week, is the Vuelta the year's toughest grand tour, once again?

It’s no secret that the Vuelta a España has spent much of the last decade pushing back the boundaries of how hard a grand tour can be. Multiple summit finishes have been plastered all over the route, flat and rolling stages have become real rarities, and each year the organiser finds new and fiendishly difficult climbs like Los Machucos in 2017, Llucena in 2016 or Hazallanas in 2013. These test the peloton with their steepness and burn out the clutches of the vehicles in the race convoy following the riders. Mark Cavendish remains the only sprinter to have stuck his head above the parapet, describing the 2016 Vuelta route as “stupid”, but it’s a safe bet at least some other fastmen secretly agree with him.

What arguably makes the 2018 Vuelta route most interesting, then, is not so much the latest new and impressively difficult set of summit finishes at Los Praeres on stage 14, and the Monte Oiz/Balcon de Bizkaia on stage 17, or even the return to one of its best-loved and most venerable ascents, the Lagos de Covadonga, on stage 15. It’s a rather more unexpected comeback.