Stage 3

The road

At the start

The fast men finally get a day

Two days of upheaval leave Nicolas Roche in red, two seconds up on Quintana and eight on Urán — and the sprinters still without a stage. Gaviria has been carrying his opening-day crash since Torrevieja. Today should be theirs: 188 kilometres from Ibi to the Alicante seafront, with only the Puerto de Tibi, forty kilometres out, between the fast men and a wide, straight run under the castle.

How it was won

1. 140 km to go

   Madrazo tops the Tibi

   The last climb of the day, a category three, and Ángel Madrazo grinds over it first to defend his mountains jersey, shadowed all the way by Rubén Guerreiro. He sits up the instant he has the points; behind him the bunch comes over the top ragged.

2. 238 km to go

   Gaviria on the wrong side

   Fernando Gaviria, still carrying the opening-day crash, is the first sprinter shelled; Fabio Jakobsen is next but claws his way back on the descent. The Colombian cannot, and sets two teammates to a 38-kilometre chase.

3. 311 km to go

   The plug is pulled

   For half an hour the chase hovers at fifty seconds and never closer. With a little over ten kilometres left UAE stop riding, and Gaviria's Vuelta loses the day it was meant to be built on.

4. 4At the line

   Bennett off Theuns' wheel

   Trek take the front from Sunweb in the Alicante home straight and Bennett does the simplest thing in sprinting: he takes Theuns' wheel and waits. At two hundred metres he comes off it and the daylight is instant — the twelfth win of a season that very nearly contained no Grand Tour at all.

The result