Stage 11

The road

At the start

Forty kilometres, and a climb in the middle

Degenkolb has four stages; Rodríguez still leads Froome by fifty-three seconds and Contador by a minute. Today is the only individual time trial of this Vuelta and it is not a pure one: forty kilometres from Cambados to Pontevedra with ten kilometres of the Alto Monte Castrove in the middle. Rodríguez has told anybody who asked that he expects to lose two or three minutes.

How it was won

1. 131 km to go

   Kessiakoff sets the mark

   Meyer went early and posted 53:53; Porte took a couple of seconds off it; and then a Swede who came here to ride for somebody else goes seven seconds quicker than Porte at the first check and keeps going.

2. 217 km to go

   The Castrove changes everything

   Ten kilometres at 4.4 per cent in the middle of a time trial is not much of a mountain, but it is enough. Contador was two seconds up on Kessiakoff at the first check and Rodríguez was thirty-nine down on Contador. On the climb, the little Catalan rides the time trial of his life.

3. 38 km to go

   Forty-one seconds

   Kessiakoff extends his advantage over Porte to forty-one seconds at the second check and then sits on the hot seat for an hour, watching every favourite in the race come down the ramp and fail to touch him.

4. 4At the line

   Purito clings on by a second

   Kessiakoff takes it by seventeen seconds from Contador, with Froome another twenty-two back. But the day belongs to the man who finished seventh: Joaquim Rodríguez, who predicted he would lose two or three minutes, loses 1:16 — and keeps the red jersey from Alberto Contador by exactly one second.

The result