Different but the same: the Vuelta a España has its first start in Barcelona in 51 years this weekend, but its traditional opening team time trial is clearly designed, as usual, to put the GC contenders through their paces from the gun.
The route is 14.8 kilometres long and runs through the streets of the city centre on Saturday evening; the course is much shorter than the opening TTT in Utrecht last August.
But the combination of broad, flat avenues of downtown Barcelona and some technical corners could easily catch out the unwary or those GC riders hoping to ride into form. Furthermore, in a race with so many GC favourites, any opportunity to snatch a few seconds advantage is not to be missed.
“There won’t be big gaps, but there will be gaps,” Ineos Grenadiers Egan Bernal said on Thursday’s press conference, while his teammate Geraint Thomas pointed out that the TTT format, which allows the entire team to go up on the winners’ podium, is both increasingly rare in bike races and hugely motivating for all the riders on the opening day of a Grand Tour.
Last but not least, the opening team time trial provides all the contenders with an opportunity to wear the leader’s jersey of the Vuelta. In what promises to be an even more hotly contested edition than usual with so many GC favourites, that is no minor matter.
The opening Vuelta a España team time trial course runs mostly on a northeast/southwest axis in the city centre roads, thereby avoiding all the hills that rise away from Barcelona’s seaport area. Instead, with just 98 vertical metres of climbing, the TTT will be one that favours teams with chrono specialists - Ineos Grenadiers Filippo Ganna, World TT Champion Remco Evenepoel, Olympic TT champion Primož Roglič and EF Education-EasyPost’s Stefan Bisseger all spring to mind - alongside strongly built power riders.
The wind is unlikely to be a real factor in such a densely built-up area, and there are no cobbled sections or seriously narrow streets to speak of, either. In fact, the only factors that could prove unpredictable are the state of the city centre streets, which will likely be very grimy given the density of the usual motor traffic, and the weather.
After weeks of drought, rain is forecast for Saturday evening and through the rest of the weekend. The change in weather is a welcome drop in temperatures after this week’s heat wave with peaks in the low 40s and high humidity in the last few days. But it could come at a price, particularly on already slippy road surfaces.
Predicting time gaps on such a short, relatively straightforward course is trickier than it looks, but Jumbo-Visma’s status as defending Vuelta TTT champions from last year, with a similarly strong lineup, makes them default favourites for the win. Ineos Grenadiers have a squad with a formidable number of former or current ITT champions, too, and others very likely to be in the running for victory include Soudal-QuickStep, UAE Team Emirates and Trek-Segafredo.
Spare a thought, too, for the citizens of Barcelona, who are anything but used to a major bike race taking over their city centre for seven hours as will happen on Saturday. The Vuelta has had stage starts and finishes in Barcelona no less than 54 times, but the last occasion was in 2012, and it ended directly in Montjuic Park.
Leading local newspaper La Vanguardia has already warned that the Vuelta’s TTT stage constitutes Barcelona’s biggest traffic disruption in recent years, and even La Volta, Catalunya’s top bike race, very rarely ventures into the main downtown of the Catalan capital in the way the Vuelta will do on Saturday afternoon. That said, as a test for the Tour de France start bid by Barcelona, the impact of La Vuelta’s opening stage could represent an important trial run for an even bigger Grand Départ sometime in the future.
Stage 2, running for 181.2 kilometres from the coastal town of Mataró to the top of Barcelona’s Montjuic Park, is predicted by race route designer Fernando Escartín to end in a bunch sprint. But if that’s the case, with a short but steep category 3 climb in the last five kilometres, the few teams that have brought a fastman with them to this year’s Vuelta will truly have to fight for it.
The category 2 ascent of Estenalles, at km 66, is the first serious climbing challenge of the 2023 Vuelta. Its relatively benign gradients, averaging out at 3.1% over 12.1 kilometres, may see some sprinters struggle. However, with nearly 120 kilometres remaining, there will be ample time for the bunch to regroup, and face the much trickier second half of the course.
As it works its way through Barcelona’s hilly hinterland back to the coastline, the last 70 kilometres of stage 2 are an incessant series of small roads, traffic furniture and roundabouts. If it rains all day, as forecast, after months of dry weather, the course could become a real skating rink.
The last part of the course is anything but straightforward. Heading directly into Barcelona’s Montjuic Park - the traditional scenario for the final stage of the Volta a Catalunya and the 1973 World Championships - the Vuelta runs through a series of switchbacks as it works its way around the park and includes a punishing if short, third category ascent to Montjuic Castle with four kilometres to go.
While the views of Barcelona and the coastline are spectacular from the castle hill, the riders won’t have any time to take that in. Instead, there’s a fast, technical descent for them to tackle and then a broad, gentle rise of around 3% (on the road used by the Volta’s usual stage 7 circuit but in the opposite direction) to the finish alongside Barcelona’s 1992 Olympic stadium.
Barring a pinch-point where the road narrows dramatically and goes through a tunnel about six kilometres to go and the short category 3 climb, the finale is not excessively difficult.
But if the race has broken apart on the urban backroads of the preceding 70 kilometres, then it could see some sort of a GC battle emerge. Rather than a sprinter, this could be a great finish for a Classics rider with fast legs: for example, think of riders like Philippe Gilbert won the last time the Vuelta finished in Barcelona, in Montjuic in 2012, when he fended off a GC challenger, Purito Rodriguez.
It wouldn’t be too farfetched, then, to think of Remco Evenepoel having a crack at attacking on that last climb and trying to stay away.
But whatever the result of what promises to be an adrenalin-packed opening weekend of racing, e Vuelta a España challengers will hardly be able to sleep easy in their beds on Sunday night. Monday sees the race make its first major incursion into the high mountains, with a brand new summit finish at El Arinsal in Andorra. The modern-day Vuelta may be on relatively unfamiliar terrain in Barcelona, then, but some things - like getting the race off to a really challenging start - don’t change.
