Stage 8

The road

At the start

Asturias, and the Colláu Fancuaya

The Vuelta reaches Asturias and starts climbing from kilometre zero: six categorised ascents in 155 kilometres, ending on the Colláu Fancuaya, a single-lane road tarmacked only in 2019, 10.3 kilometres at 7.9 per cent. Remco Evenepoel leads Rudy Molard by 21 seconds and Enric Mas by 28. Primož Roglič, a minute and one second down, is the man everybody will be watching today.

How it was won

1. 1145 km to go

   Attacking from the gun

   With climbing from kilometre zero, the fight starts immediately. Lutsenko, Pinot and Vine are all in the first moves, and it is Vine who takes the full five points over the top to put himself into the virtual mountains lead.

2. 241 km to go

   Twenty-seven points and counting

   The ten-man break has become a quality group — Soler, Landa, Pedersen, Pinot, Taaramäe — and Vine keeps mopping up, three more points here to take him to twenty-seven and leave only the summit finish to fight over.

3. 328 km to go

   Pedersen takes green, then goes backwards

   Twenty points at the intermediate move the Dane into the lead of the sprint classification. Shortly afterwards, as the road rises towards Colláu Fancuaya, he is dropped from the front group and the climbers take over.

4. 46 km to go

   Vine goes alone into the fog

   Lutsenko and Vine trade accelerations six kilometres from the top of the 10.1km, 8.5% climb, and the Australian simply pushes on. The break shatters behind him and nobody organises. Soler emerges as the lone chaser but never gets close.

5. 5At the line

   Two summit finishes in three days

   Vine rides out of the mist above a thousand metres to win again, and takes the polka-dot jersey with him. A rider who came to the sport through indoor racing has just beaten a Grand Tour field to two mountaintops in a week.

The result