Stage 21

The road

At the start

The last 97 kilometres, up the Alhambra

Mas held the Collado del Alguacil and holds it: 2:15 on Roglič, 2:44 on Gall, and no mountain left to lose it on. Eddie Dunbar, who won on Friday, is one of three who did not finish yesterday; forty-two are gone. But this is no procession — 97 kilometres out of Granada and back, then four laps over the Alto de la Alhambra, 2.1 kilometres at 6.6 per cent each time. Steven Kruijswijk rides the last day of his career.

How it was won

1. 132 km to go

   Into the circuits, still all together

   The last day of this Vuelta is not a parade. Ninety-seven kilometres out of Granada and back into it, and then four laps of a finishing circuit with the Alto de la Alhambra on every one of them — two point one kilometres at six point six per cent, four times over. The bunch arrives at the first passage of the line intact, Visma setting the tempo with Steven Kruijswijk on the front riding the last day of his career, and it is Groupama-FDJ who take it off them the second time the road goes up.

2. 224 km to go

   Eight clear with twenty-four to go

   The second time up the Alhambra breaks it open. Eight riders come clear with twenty-four kilometres left — Finn Fisher-Black, Matthew Brennan, Milan Vader, Axel Laurance, Valentin Paret-Peintre, Thibau Nys and Alessandro Romele among them — and on the next lap Santiago Buitrago surges out of a peloton that Movistar are now riding at the pace of a team with nothing left to defend but the shape of the day, and drags a larger chase group off the front with him.

3. 38 km to go

   Bilbao over the Alhambra, Laurance past him

   Pau Miquel rides the front group off its feet on the last ascent of the Alto de la Alhambra and launches Pello Bilbao over the top alone, and for half a lap it looks like the move that wins in Granada. Then Axel Laurance comes across to him, sits on for almost no time at all, and drops him with seven and a half kilometres left. Behind Laurance a dozen riders are still coming — Nys, Widar, Buitrago, Tronchon, Debruyne, Johannessen, Romele, Tejada — and not one of them is finished.

4. 4At the line

   Johannessen wins it; Mas is crowned

   Laurance attacks once more and is swallowed, and out of what survives it is Ramses Debruyne who does the work, towing Tobias Halland Johannessen and Alessandro Romele under the flamme rouge and on to six hundred metres. Johannessen takes the final right-hand bend in front, opens his sprint out of it, and holds Romele off at the line. Then Enric Mas comes up that same Granada straight in red — four times a podium finisher at this race and never once its winner until today — into a crowd that has waited twelve years for a Spaniard to do this, and half an hour to watch him do it. Movistar have not won a Grand Tour since 2019.

The result