Stage 17

The road

At the start

The flattest road, into Sevilla

Matthew Brennan has four stages of this Vuelta and a green jersey for a lead-out man. Behind them nothing moves: Mas by 2:06 from Gall, 2:10 from Roglič, unchanged for four days. Timo Roosen climbed off yesterday, the rest day not enough to mend a second-week crash, and thirty-five are gone. Today is the flattest road here — Dos Hermanas to Sevilla, no categorised climb, twenty kilometres of roundabouts at the end.

How it was won

1. 115 km to go

   Paleni goes alone, and nearly gets away with it

   Enzo Paleni and Sinuhé Fernández have been out since the opening kilometres, and when Visma and Cofidis stop pulling to call somebody else's bluff the gap balloons to five and a half minutes before Visma quietly answer their own question and go back to the front. At San José de la Rinconada the two lead through the sprint without contesting it; behind them Coquard jumps for the points and takes them off Van Aert, who does not hide what he thinks of it. Then Paleni drops his companion with fifteen kilometres left, and for a few minutes a heist looks possible.

2. 2At the line

   Brennan's fifth, into Sevilla

   Paleni is caught three kilometres out and the riders who have been waiting for exactly that go at once. Van Aert has to close a three-man move himself, and with no Laporte to call on and the whole Visma team spent policing the break all day, there is nobody left to lead a sprint out — so Uno-X take it, six abreast, the most conventional finale of the week through a run-in made of roundabouts. It changes nothing. Van Aert muscles Brennan up through the chaos one more time and drops him on Magnus Cort's wheel, and the twenty-one-year-old wins a fifth stage of his first Grand Tour.

The result