Stage 7

The road

At the start

Two hundred and eight kilometres to Seville

Four days and nothing has changed: Nibali leads Horner by three seconds and Roche by eight. Today is the longest stage of this Vuelta, south to Mairena del Aljarafe on the edge of Seville — flat, hot, and with a final ten kilometres full of roundabouts and corners that anyone who has studied the road book will have noticed.

How it was won

1. 130 km to go

   Through the finish with 1:25

   Pinotti, Knees and Aramendia have had seven minutes at their best. They come through the finish area for the first time, thirty kilometres from the end of it, with a minute and twenty-five seconds.

2. 216 km to go

   Pinotti caught, Dan Martin down

   The last man out front is taken sixteen kilometres from home, and RadioShack wind the pace up for Cancellara. Then, with eleven to go, Dan Martin hits the deck; he will lose 1:32 and, as it turns out, his Vuelta.

3. 39 km to go

   Gilbert reads the road book

   Nine kilometres out, with a technical run-in full of roundabouts ahead, the world champion attacks — and Zdeněk Štybar, who had spotted the same thing in the road book that morning, moves smoothly across to his wheel.

4. 4At the line

   A tyre's width

   Twelve seconds into the last kilometre, and a game of who blinks. Gilbert slows entering the straight, Štybar refuses the bait, and the Belgian has to open it at two hundred metres. The Czech comes past, Gilbert claws back almost all of it, and the photograph gives it to Štybar by the width of a tyre.

The result