Primož Roglič hasn’t often dealt knockout blows like the one he delivered on the Alto de Moncalvillo on stage 19 of the Vuelta a España. For most of his remarkable stage racing career, the Slovenian has tended to amass his winning margins in steady increments, delivering the same combination time and again to collect handfuls of seconds and time bonuses on mountaintops.
The strategy hasn’t worked every time – Roglič was famously caught with a late haymaker by Tadej Pogačar on the 2020 Tour de France after missing earlier opportunities to end the contest – but it has carried him to 21 stage race victories across his career. Roglič, understandably, has rarely seen fit to deviate too radically from that repetitive but winning formula.
At this Vuelta, Roglič, nursing a back injury from his latest star-crossed Tour de France experience, had appeared to be sticking to that tried and trusted playbook during the opening week. He was the best of the overall contenders in the opening time trial in Lisbon and he claimed narrow hilltop wins at Pico Villuercas and Cazorla. So far, so Roglič.
Roglič continued to work the clock in the second week, before his first real flex on the Puerto de Ancares on stage 13. A short climb with wickedly steep slopes was always liable to play in Roglič’s favour and he took full advantage, putting a minute into Enric Mas (Movistar) and almost two into red jersey Ben O’Connor (Decathlon-AG2R).
In the aftermath of that exhibition, Roglič looked every inch the winner of this Vuelta, but that consensus suddenly began to soften all over again when he betrayed signs of relative weakness with subdued displays at Cuitu Negru and Lagos de Covadonga.
Although Roglič did enough in Asturias to move within five seconds of O’Connor’s overall lead, he didn’t gain ground on Mas and Richard Carapaz (EF Education-Easy Post). Both Mas and Carapaz arrived at the Vuelta’s demanding final days nursing increasingly sincere hopes that they could beat Roglič, as demonstrated by the former’s aggression at Lagos de Covadonga and the latter’s surprise offensive on Puerto Herrera on stage 18.
Those thoughts surely evaporated at a spot a little more than 6km from the summit of the Alto de Moncalvillo on Friday afternoon. It would already have been demoralising enough for Mas and Carapaz to be dropped by Roglič alone at that point. It must have been absolutely crushing to be distanced by two of Roglič’s Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe domestiques, too.
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After Roger Adria had shredded the red jersey group on the lower slopes of the climb, Daniel Martínez conjured up a stint of pace-making so supersonic that only his teammates Aleksandr Vlasov and Roglič could follow. There were shades of Team Sky at Pierre Saint Martin or Jumbo-Visma at Hautacam about their startling collective strength here as the trio pulled away and quickly put 20 seconds into the best climbers of the Vuelta.
Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe have only occasionally added up to the sum of their considerable parts on this unusual Vuelta, but here, like on the Puerto de Ancares, they were fully firing.
Roglič, meanwhile, wasn’t content simply to claim back the red jersey or win the stage. He seemed to want to remove the very idea of winning the Vuelta a España from the heads of Mas, Carapaz and O’Connor with two days still to race.
After Martinez swung off, Vlasov was next up to the plate in Red Bull’s impromptu team sprint up the side of a mountaintop in La Rioja. Roglič was finally alone with 5km to go, and he continued to turn his gear over in metronomic fashion thereafter, occasionally rising from his saddle to pile on more pressure.
Come the summit, Roglič had 46 seconds on second-placed David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ), with Mas the best of the GC men at 50 seconds. Carapaz conceded 1:03 and the erstwhile red jersey O’Connor lost 1:49. By the measured standards of Roglič’s later career, this was a rout.
It was certainly Roglič’s most striking solo exhibition since his victory at Lagos de Covadonga on the 2021 Vuelta, and it was his biggest margin of victory since that day when he won by 1:35 from then-teammate Sepp Kuss.
Since claiming his third Vuelta victory later that week, Roglič hadn’t won a race of any description by a margin of 46 seconds, not even the overall title of last year’s Giro d’Italia, which he claimed by just 14 seconds from Geraint Thomas.
With two days of this Vuelta remaining, Roglič is back in the red jersey with a lead of 1:54 over O’Connor, while Mas trails by 2:20 and Carapaz is now 2:54 down. There is still a demanding afternoon of climbing in Burgos to come, as well as the final time trial in Madrid, but even with all the usual caveats about crashes and ill fortune, Roglič is set to win the Vuelta on Sunday evening.
That victory will see Roglič equal Roberto Heras’ record of four Vuelta victories but, more than anything, it makes some amends for his latest heartbreak at the Tour de France, where a crash and a fractured vertebra forced him to abandon in the second week.
His Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe squad, meanwhile, will view the imminent victory as some justification for their hefty investment in Roglič when he extricated himself from his contract with Jumbo-Visma last Autumn, even if the goal remains to build a Tour de France-winning team.
It remains to be seen if Roglič, 35 next month, will be the man to lead that squad next year against Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard. Those persistent rumours linking Remco Evenepoel with the German squad haven’t been substantiated and yet they have never dissipated either.
Perhaps Roglič’s exhibition on the Alto de Moncalvillo wasn’t only a knockout blow to his rivals on this Vuelta, but a reminder to his paymasters of just what he can still do.
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