'Mikel Landa lands in the cradle of Landismo' read the headline in Marca on Thursday morning, as the newspaper previewed the Vuelta a España's lone day in the Basque Country, and the man himself was naturally greeted with the greatest acclaim when the peloton arrived in Vitoria for the start of stage 17.
"Mikel, Mikel!" cried a family bedecked in Athletic Bilbao jerseys at the first sighting of Landa, and the sea of ikurrina flags on the roadside all fluttered with a touch more fervour when the Soudal-QuickStep rider rode past on this way to sign on.
"It's a stage for the breakaway," Landa said when he arrived in the mixed zone. "I think for the general classification, it's difficult that anything will happen today."
Those would, alas, prove to be fateful last words. In the middle of a day for the breakaway, a battle for the general classification broke out, and Landa was the rider to lose out. When Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) accelerated and stretched the peloton on the climb of Puerto Herrera with a shade under 50km to go, Landa was surprisingly unable to follow.
A ten-metre gap quickly stretched out to half a minute. Landa briefly looked to have steadied the ship at the summit of the climb, but when Carapaz and EF continued their offensive over the top, he was irretrievably distanced.
Casper Pedersen, part of the day's early break, was ordered by his team – rebadged as T-Rex-QuickStep – to wait and try to pace Landa back up to the group of favourites, but there was precious little to be done. The gap to his podium rivals continued to mushroom. On the final run-in to Maeztu, Landa settled into a sizeable chasing group, already resigned to the fact that he would not win this Vuelta.
Landa would reach Maeztu exactly ten minutes down on stage winner Urko Berrade (Kern Pharma) and, more relevantly, he lost 3:20 to the men vying for the podium. In the Vuelta a España overall standings, he slips from fifth overall to tenth. He now lies 5:38 off the red jersey and more than four minutes off a podium place.
Whatever the result, Landa is usually a most willing interviewee at the finish lines. When he lost his Giro d'Italia hopes to a crash at the foot of the Blockhaus in 2017, for instance, he started talking journalists through the incident before he had wheeled to a halt and before they had even asked a question.
A setback of this magnitude on home roads hit a little differently. On crossing the finish line, Landa glumly accepted a bottle from his soigneur before turning and soft-pedalling towards his team bus, ignoring the entreaties of a television crew.
Landa's forlorn silence already said plenty, but his teammate Pedersen was asked to fill in some of the gaps when he arrived in the finish area a little later. While EF Education-EasyPost had placed James Shaw and Owain Doull in the break expressly to aid Carapaz's offensive, Pedersen confirmed that the team had simply been targeting the stage win.
"We wanted to give Mattia Cattaneo a chance to go for the stage win because he does so much work for the team," Pedersen said. "This was the day to try to do that for him, but sometimes you have bad days. Landa was struggling on the climb, so we had to change the plans to try to help him in that situation. In the end, it was a bad situation for us, and we were not able to really change it.
"For sure it was a very challenging climb, for sure you always need to be ready. I think the guys in the bunch from our team were ready, but some days you have bad legs. You have a bad day and that's how it is. For sure they were ready and really focused, but that's how it is."
As a most arduous Vuelta reaches its final days, perhaps it was only to be expected that the accumulated fatigue would take its toll. Landa, it must be recalled, already placed fifth overall at the Tour de France in July. "The legs of the Tour were different. We're not far away from them, but we're not close either," Landa had said gnomically of his condition earlier this week.
Within minutes of the finish, the Spanish press had dived headlong into the post-mortem. "A T-Rex without a head devours Mikel Landa's podium options" was one scathing critique of his team's decision to send Pedersen, Cattaneo and Mauri Vansevenant up the road on a day like this.
Perhaps, but maybe a day like this is always a possibility for Landa. Much like Thibaut Pinot, his very fragility is an inherent part of his popularity. Wins and losses are mere details; it's the emotions that endure in the memory. The crowds applauding him gently as he soft-pedalled towards the bus after the stage understood as much. Landismo giveth and Landismo taketh away.
And, of course, there's always a chance to dream it up all over again. On Saturday, the Vuelta's final summit finish is at Picón Blanco, where Landa won on the Vuelta a Burgos in 2017. In the cradle of Landismo at least, the idea lives on.
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