Stage 15

The road

At the start

The Angliru

Wiggins leads Froome by seven seconds and Mollema by 36, with Cobo fourth at 55 and Nibali slid to seventh. Today is short at 141 kilometres and it holds the Alto del Cordal and then the hardest climb in Spain, whose middle section at Les Cabañes touches 22 percent. Every kilometre of this route since Benidorm has been pointing at this afternoon.

How it was won

1. 163 km to go

   Three men, five minutes

   Talansky, Champion and Geschke have had six minutes and, over the Alto de Tenebredo with 57 kilometres left, still have 5:10. Seventeen kilometres later it is 2:10, because the climbing has started properly.

2. 221 km to go

   The Cordal, and then the wall

   Geschke drops his two companions on the first-category Cordal and is caught by Bruseghin; Moncoutié, Dan Martin and Carlos Sastre come across to make a small group at the front. Everybody knows the Cordal is only the doorway.

3. 38 km to go

   Sastre onto the Angliru

   The 2008 Tour winner goes alone with eight brutal kilometres left and sixteen seconds. Behind him, before the climb has even shown its teeth, Vincenzo Nibali is already going backwards.

4. 45 km to go

   Les Cabañes, 22 percent

   On the section that broke this climb's reputation into cycling folklore, Igor Anton reaches Sastre and then leaves him, riding for a stage win on the day the whole race has been pointing at.

5. 53 km to go

   Wiggins cracks

   Three kilometres from the summit the red jersey comes apart on a gradient that does not forgive a bad minute, and Juan José Cobo — a rider whose career had been going quietly nowhere for two seasons — rides straight past the Vuelta and away from it.

6. 6At the line

   Alto de l'Angliru

   Cobo has time to zip up his jersey and win the queen stage alone, taking red with Froome second overall at twenty seconds and Wiggins third at 46. In 2019 the UCI strips him of everything on biological-passport evidence, and this ride goes out of the record entirely.

The result