Alejandro Valverde (Movistar Team) mastered the uphill finish on Saturday at Almaden to claim his second stage win at La Vuelta 18, one week after another punchy finish at Caminito del Rey. This time, the Spanish veteran dominated Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) and Danny Van Poppel (LottoNL-Jumbo) after 195.1km covered at blazing speeds. Valverde now has 11 La Vuelta successes under his belt. On the eve of Sunday’s summit finish at La Covatilla, he moves closer to the red jersey still held by Rudy Molard (Groupama-FDJ).
Three attackers immediately jumped ahead of the peloton and quickly got far ahead of the pack. Tiago Machado (Katusha-Alpecin), Jorge Cubero (Burgos-BH) and Hector Saez (Euskadi-Murias) covered 43.6km in the first hour of racing to enjoy a lead of 10’40’’. The gap to the pack had reached 11’14’’ when Giacomo Nizzolo’s Trek-Segafredo, Peter Sagan’s Bora-Hansgrohe, Nacer Bouhanni’s Cofidis and Elia Viviani’s Quick-Step Floors came to the front of the bunch to try and control the race.
Sagan, so close
The gap still increased above 12 minutes in the only categorised climb of the day, the 10.3km long Alto de Españares, summited first by Hector Saez. The leading trio still had 113km to go to the finish line. Sprinters teams picked up the pace after the climb and brought the gap down under 10 minutes as they reached km 100.
The battle was on and it kept going at a very hard pace until the end, with the gap gradually coming down: 5’15’’ with 50km to go, 1’50’’ as the race entered the last 20km. Tiago Machado sent solo with 7km to go but eventually got reeled in one kilometre further away as the peloton set the bunch gallop. Ivan Garcia Cortina (Bahrain-Merida) tried to anticipate the sprint and Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) looked set to claim his first stage win at La Vuelta since 2015… But the expert Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) had perfectly timed his move and the World champion finished 2nd for the second day in a row.
