Stage 8

The road

How it was won

1. 148 km to go

   The crash that empties the race

   Forty-eight kilometres out, on the run to the day's two climbs, the peloton goes down. Kris Boeckmans lies motionless for minutes and is taken straight to hospital; Van Garderen gets up with a broken collarbone; Dan Martin's Vuelta ends here; Bouhanni remounts, falls again and gives in.

2. 236 km to go

   A lull, and a regroup

   Through Murcia the racing stops being racing for a few kilometres and several groups — one of them containing the red jersey — get back on. Then the road goes up.

3. 312 km to go

   Everyone attacks the Cresta del Gallo

   Terpstra goes and is passed by his own teammate Brambilla. Dumoulin tries to smother the climbers on his own and cannot. Chaves, Rodríguez, Valverde and Quintana all have a dig, Rojas crashes on the descent, and forty riders regroup at the bottom of it.

4. 48 km to go

   Sagan and the service moto

   Gonçalves, Elissonde and Losada take nineteen seconds and threaten to steal the day. Sagan, the favourite for what is left of the sprint, goes after them himself — and collides with a neutral service motorbike, ending up with torn shorts and no chance.

5. 5At the line

   Stuyven, with a broken wrist

   Hansen's dig at 1.5 kilometres fails. In the last hundred metres Jasper Stuyven comes through to win the biggest race of his life — riding, it will emerge, on a fractured scaphoid.

The result