Of the three Grand Tours, the Giro d’Italia may nearly always be the toughest physically and the Tour de France the most demanding in terms of mental pressure. But summer after summer, when it comes to richly unpredictable race action from start to finish, the Vuelta a España remains in a class of its own.
In last year’s Vuelta, for example, who could have expected that Sepp Kuss, well-known as a top support climber but never previously a GC contender, would fight against all the odds - and even his own teammates at times - to capture North America’s first Grand Tour in a decade? Or that Remco Evenepoel, so confident a conqueror of the Vuelta in 2022, would collapse so spectacularly in the first major Pyrenean stage? Or that less than 12 months after Juan Ayuso had become the second youngest Grand Tour podium finisher ever in the Vuelta, up-and-coming French climbing talent Lenny Martínez would push the bar even higher and become the 79-year-old Vuelta’s youngest-ever leader?
