Stage 20

The road

At the start

Five thousand metres, and the last of them

Peñas Blancas changed nothing — Roglič still at 1:37, Gall still at 3:01 — so everything anyone still wants out of this Vuelta has to be taken today. It is the biggest climbing day of the three weeks: 187 kilometres and five thousand metres above Granada, El Purche twice from opposite sides, then El Duque, then a summit finish on the Collado del Alguacil. Tomorrow is a circuit race. This is the last mountain.

How it was won

1. 197 km to go

   Kuss goes with ninety-seven to go

   Eighty kilometres in, the leaders are nine minutes up the road and a fifty-man chase group sits three twenty behind them, and none of that turns out to be what the day is about. On the first ramps of the Puerto de El Purche, Sepp Kuss attacks the red jersey group — ninety-seven kilometres from the line, from eleventh overall — and two kilometres later Richard Carapaz goes after him. The last mountain stage of the Vuelta has started with half of itself still to ride.

2. 293 km to go

   Gall closes it over the first Purche

   Decathlon lost Matthew Riccitello to a crash before the climbing even began, so Felix Gall answers this one himself, and he does it going over the top: Kuss and Carapaz are back in the fold at the summit of El Purche, with Mas and Roglič sitting on the Austrian's wheel and Oscar Onley already losing contact behind them. The peloton is in pieces with half the stage left. That is exactly what Decathlon came for, and exactly what Movistar did not.

3. 361 km to go

   Up El Purche a second time

   The same climb again from the other side, and by now the stage is a set of private wars fought at different points on the same mountain. Onley goes up it three minutes down and shedding more of the white jersey with every kilometre. Out in front, riders start dropping back through the convoy to find their leaders — Brennan, Vincenzo Albanese and Sander De Pestel all give up a breakaway place to go and work — which is what the last mountain day of a Grand Tour looks like when half the teams in it still have something to save.

4. 431 km to go

   Eight thirty, and then a trackstand

   The leaders cross the intermediate sprint and climb the Puerto de El Duque eight and a half minutes clear, and up there Tobias Halland Johannessen jumps, with Mikel Landa and Ramses Debruyne going with him. In the red jersey group the exact opposite happens. Nobody will lead, the pace sinks to something close to a trackstand, Carapaz throws move after move at men who simply refuse to be dislodged, and the gap to the front of the race drifts out to nine and a half minutes. Iván Romeo slides back through the cars before the summit to sit beside Mas.

5. 57 km to go

   Landa attacks with seven to go

   Seven kilometres from the top of the Collado del Alguacil, Mikel Landa goes. Debruyne is gone immediately and Johannessen is in trouble behind him, and the thirty-six-year-old Basque — five years without a win of any kind — takes the steep part of the last climb of this Vuelta alone. Nine minutes below him Pablo Castrillo, the last Movistar man to come back out of the breakaway for his leader, is riding a tempo so even that nobody will put their nose into it.

6. 65 km to go

   Gall goes, and Roglič cannot

   Castrillo finishes his turn and Gall attacks the second it stops. Mas goes with him — the red jersey, on the last mountain of his race, following the only man still trying to take it away — and Roglič and Carapaz do not. Inside two kilometres the Austrian has thirty seconds on the Slovenian and second overall is suddenly a live question, though the answer to it needs a minute and twenty-four.

7. 7At the line

   Landa at last, and the Vuelta is Mas's

   Mikel Landa crosses the line on the Cima Alberto Fernández forty-nine seconds ahead of Johannessen and a minute twenty-seven ahead of Debruyne, and stops, and cannot speak: a first victory in five years, taken on the final summit of a Grand Tour in his own country. Behind him Gall drops Mas inside the last two kilometres and rides for the minute and a half he needs against Roglič, gets nowhere near it, and consolidates a podium place instead. And Enric Mas comes over the top of the last mountain of the 81st Vuelta having answered every attack every rider has thrown at him for three weeks, with nothing between him and Granada now but a circuit race.

The result