“We’re certainly going to miss him,” was how Visma-Lease a Bike teammate and Vuelta a España champion Sepp Kuss described how the loss of co-leader Wout van Aert would affect the Dutch team in the Spanish Grand Tour.
Before crashing out late on stage 16 of the Vuelta a España on Tuesday, Van Aert had been a major player in the race. Three stage victories, a two-day spell in la roja, and holding a joint lead of the mountains and points classifications when he had to quit were all already in the Belgian star’s palmares.
But that seemingly non-stop succession of triumphs and leads came to an abrupt halt on the descent of the Collada Llomera on Tuesday, when a bad crash on a sweeping left-hand bend ripped through the break of the day and saw Van Aert and two other riders, Felix Engelhart (Jayco-AIUIa) and Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates), all hit the deck.
The Mexican and German came through more or less unscathed, but when Van Aert attempted to continue, his deep right knee injury made it impossible.
“We’re certainly going to miss him, it was quite hard seeing him there on the side of the road, already stopped with the car,” Kuss said at the stage 17 start.
“Yesterday [Tuesday] we just had to try and be focussed, finish the stage as best as we could. But today you noticed [his absence] in the team bus a bit more.”
Kuss himself was instrumental in Van Aert’s second stage win at the Vuelta at Cordoba, when the North American rode himself into the ground pulling back late attacker Marc Soler (UAE Team Emirates). But as the Colorado racer observed, it was Van Aert himself who made the difference each time.
“He’s irreplaceable, specially with what he’s achieved in the race and what there was left for him to go for.
“He gave the team a really good focus on pretty much every stage. So without him that changes things. But we’ll do our best with the guys we have left.”
In the 2021 Vuelta when the peloton tackled the the same descent in much heavier rainfall than Tuesday, there were also a welter of fallers. Kuss - who went on to finish second that day at Lagos de Covadonga behind then-teammate Primoz Roglič - recalled the instance.
“I remember I had already passed through the part of the descent when the falls happened. In the peloton, we were going really cautiously down the whole of it. But for sure the break [with Van Aert in the 2024 Vuelta] had a bit more reason to race harder.”
Rather than start a blame game, Kuss argued that on this occasion at least the crash was “no one’s fault or anything, just in these kinds of roads there are always dangerous conditions. It’s always a bit wet, a bit dry and a bit in between. You never know when you might slide.”
Twelfth overall after an incident-free stage 17, Kuss said that he had no criticisms of the Vuelta organiser’s system for indicating dangerous and/or technical segments of the stages.
“In a lot of these races, the signalling has been really good. It always really helps, specially on these tricky roads that are interesting and nice to race on, but where you have to have the right warnings and stuff in place.
“And I think the organisation does a good job with that here and it’s hard to say but you can’t mark every corner. In the end sometimes you just have to be lucky and be in the right place at the right time.”
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