The snapshot provided by the final climb can sometimes offer a misleading overview of the day's racing. However, there was nothing deceptive about the picture painted by the Alto de Mougás on stage 10 of the Vuelta a España. In so far as possible in a race of this intensity, Ben O'Connor enjoyed a relatively comfortable day in the red jersey of race leader.
It helped, of course, that the Vuelta's long transfer north to Galicia brought with it a hefty drop in temperature. After the mercury had climbed above 40°C amid the parched terrain of Andalusia last week, the air was mercifully cooler as the peloton navigated the verdant peaks of the Rías Baixas on Tuesday – even if, like O'Connor's apparent ease on the final climb, it's all relative.
"Aw mate, I don't think anyone's complaining that it's not 38 or 40°C every day," O'Connor smiled when he took a seat in the press conference truck in Baiona. "It's a beautiful region, and it's nice to see green again. It's good to be back in respectable weather. It was still 30°C at points today, but there's a big difference between 30°C and 40°C. At that point, you can never really cool down."
As ever when a Grand Tour resumes after a rest day, there was a blistering start to the action as the race left Ponteareas, but once stage winner Wout van Aert and the break had established themselves, there was a significant degree of cooling in the main peloton. The climbs of the Vilachán and the Mabia passed without any serious unrest in the bunch, and O'Connor's Decathlon-AG2R teammates policed affairs firmly for most of the category 1 Alto de Mougás to boot.
Although EF Education-EasyPost briefly upped the tempo on behalf of Richard Carapaz, there would be no insurrection from O'Connor's GC rivals. Instead, his teammates Felix Gall and Valentin Paret-Peintre resumed their positions at the head of the red jersey group, which reached Baiona intact after the 20km drop off the final climb.
"Credit the boys: we were strong all day, we controlled it from the start, we let the right break go," O'Connor said. "On the final climb, Valentin was excellent, he was back to the Valentin you saw in the Giro d'Italia. I guess it was quite a fast climb at the end. Carapaz did try to give it a crack, but I don't really know what the damage was, I just held the wheel. I felt great again today.
"And we had it under control. It wasn't really a day for GC guys to go for it because the descent at the end was pretty long, so it was a lot of effort for not a lot of reward. And I think the team was looking strong enough to deter attacks as well."
In the overall standings, O'Connor remains 3:53 clear of Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and 4:32 ahead of Carapaz. The road from here to Madrid remains both long and arduous, of course, but with each passing day, the failure of Red Bull et al to limit O'Connor's winning margin at Yunquera increasingly looks like a calamitous error. Even so, O'Connor was circumspect when asked to assess his prospects of winning this race overall on September 8.
"I'm not going to give you my probability index," O'Connor smiled. "I think I'm riding well, I'm in the jersey, and I've got a four-minute lead. But cycling as a sport to bet on is a fickle business. In the end, you can draw your own conclusions about who is the guy to beat. But you'll really only be able to figure it out on Sunday week."
Netflix
O'Connor has typically been a relaxed and personable interviewee since he entered the professional peloton in 2017 so it really shouldn't come as a surprise that he has cut such a calm and personable figure since taking the red jersey last Thursday. And yet, thanks to a global streaming behemoth, a different image of the Subiaco man has forced its way into the collective consciousness these past two summers.
In the two seasons of Netflix's Tour de France: Unchained documentary to date, O'Connor emerged as the show's most compelling figure for his unvarnished responses to the difficulties he endured in each race. The character references provided by members of team management – "He's just ruled by his emotions," Vincent Lavenu complained – only served to hammer home the Netflix depiction of O'Connor as a somewhat tempestuous figure. The reality, he insisted in Ponteareas on Tuesday morning, is a little different.
"I guess that's what TV is, it's there for entertainment and drama, but it doesn't always show you as you actually are," O'Connor smiled. "At the moment, I'm a happy man, I'm relaxed and enjoying it. For sure, I'm an angry man sometimes too, but I hope I'm not a bad person.
"I mean, some moments [from the Netflix series] are pretty true, but in others, there is zero context to the shot, it's not related at all to the event in play. It can be a little frustrating, but whatever. You just have to try to forget about it. Really, who cares about what someone in America or another person thinks of you? I believe in myself, and I go about my business how I choose.
"The thing is you don't really know what's coming, because you don't have any preview. I don't know what part of the questions they're going to use. Remember, you sit in front of this camera for two hours answering questions. Things sometimes get a bit out of hand, and they take context from that even when it's not related."
At this Vuelta, by contrast, the context is always clear in Connor's mind. Fourth overall at this year's Giro d'Italia, he is firmly in the hunt to win this race outright, and he has taken heart from his Decathlon-AG2R squad's defence of his lead. "I'd say that our team is strong," O'Connor said. "We have the ability to control a race and decide how it plays out."
Get unlimited access to all of our coverage of the 2024 Vuelta a España - including breaking news and analysis reported by our journalists on the ground from every stage as it happens and more. Find out more.
