Stage 11

The road

At the start

Froome in red, and Galicia ahead

Chris Froome finished second to Tony Martin in Salamanca and is the unlikeliest leader of this Vuelta: twelve seconds up on Fuglsang and twenty on Bradley Wiggins, who came here as the leader of the team. Today is the first of Galicia's hard days, 4,166 metres of climbing and then nineteen kilometres at six percent to a first-ever summit finish at the Manzaneda ski station.

How it was won

1. 1139 km to go

   Nineteen up the road

   Barredo goes after one kilometre and is shut down, Chavanel tries next, and after thirty kilometres a sixteen-man move finally sticks and grows to nineteen. Only Duarte and Luis León Sánchez are a threat to the jersey, so Sky ride tempo and let it be.

2. 236 km to go

   Moncoutié takes the taster

   The Frenchman surges over the third-category Alto de Ermida ahead of Montaguti, which is worth points and, more usefully, tells him how his legs are with a nineteen-kilometre climb still to come.

3. 314 km to go

   Manzaneda

   Palomares goes, then Paulinho, and then David Moncoutié goes and nobody sees him again. He has been hunting a stage and the mountains jersey since Benidorm and today he collects both on one windswept climb.

4. 44 km to go

   Froome slides backwards

   Behind, Martin, Mollema and then Rodriguez attack in turn on the long exposed haul, and the red jersey answers every one of them — except that it is Wiggins doing the answering, while Froome quietly drops down the line of riders.

5. 5At the line

   Estación de Montaña Manzaneda

   Moncoutié wins by 1:18 from Intxausti. Froome loses 27 seconds, Fuglsang is not in the front group at all, and Bradley Wiggins becomes the eighth leader of this Vuelta with Froome second at seven seconds. On a summit finish, the general classification got tighter.

The result