Stage 10

The road

At the start

Riis sends two riders home

The news on the start line is that Bjarne Riis has sent Andy Schleck and Stuart O'Grady home for drinking after dinner on the rest day; the Tour, eight seconds and a dropped chain ago, already feels distant. Antón and Rodríguez remain level on time, Nibali two seconds back. Today is flat until the Alto del Rat Penat, a first-category wall of twenty-three per cent pitches thirty kilometres from Vilanova.

How it was won

1. 1135 km to go

   Katusha will not let anything go

   The first hour covers 47 kilometres because Katusha refuse to allow a break until the intermediate sprint has been contested. Cavendish and Farrar take the first two places, Rodríguez takes third and the two-second bonus, and only then does the day's escape get its licence.

2. 235 km to go

   Over the Rat Penat

   Karpets does most of the climbing at the front of the peloton and drops a good many riders without troubling any contender. Ahead, Le Mével leads Moreno over the summit with three seconds on the chase, and nine of them come together on the descent.

3. 320 km to go

   Erviti catches them napping

   Just after one of the short sharp rises that punctuate the descent, Imanol Erviti slips off the front. The road twists, he goes out of sight, and by the time anyone looks up he has thirty seconds.

4. 4At the line

   Erviti alone in Vilanova

   The roads straighten with eight kilometres left and the half-minute never moves. Erviti has time to sit up in the finishing straight; Zingle leads the chasers in 37 seconds later. Rodríguez's two bonus seconds have made him leader of the Vuelta in his own region.

The result