Stage 6

The road

At the start

Gravel on El Bartolo, then a descent

Nothing has moved on general classification since Andorra — Pogačar by 3:21 from Roglič, 3:32 from Mas — and Brennan has taken his second stage from a bunch the Puerto de Paüls could not break up. Four riders are already home. Today the Vuelta finally puts gravel in front of them: an unpaved ramp to the top of the Puerto El Bartolo, eighteen kilometres from the line, and then a descent into Castelló.

How it was won

1. 1109 km to go

   Sixteen settle on the Bandereta

   Lutsenko goes at kilometre sixteen with Bisiaux for company and the attacking does not stop until the Coll de la Bandereta, where sixteen riders finally settle — Van Aert, Bilbao, Kron, Bennett, Buitrago, Leemreize, Debruyne among them. UAE let them have two minutes forty and not a second more.

2. 255 km to go

   Van Aert takes his twenty points

   Van Aert leads the break through Benicàssim for the twenty at the intermediate sprint, and that is as far as his day goes. Eight kilometres later the Alto del Desierto de las Palmas puts him out the back of his own breakaway, and the sixteen start coming apart with the hardest climbing still in front of them.

3. 323 km to go

   Pogačar hits the gravel

   UAE come onto El Bartolo with a minute and a half to find and burn straight through it — Vine's pull empties the bunch, Pablo Torres delivers the last kick, and Onley, trying to follow, loses the wheel with twenty-four kilometres left. Pogačar goes onto the nineteen hundred metres of dust and picks off what is left of the break, Kron and then Debruyne, until with twenty-three to go there is nobody in front of him at all.

4. 419 km to go

   Mas rides back onto the red jersey

   Then the thing nobody has seen this year. Enric Mas, thirty-two and written off for two seasons, comes out of the chase group on his own, holds the gap steady across the gravel, and closes it. At the top of the Puerto El Bartolo he goes past the red jersey to take the mountain points off him — the shock of this Vuelta so far, and for the length of one descent the race is open again.

5. 515 km to go

   Off the road on the descent

   They go over the top together and Pogačar loses the front wheel on the way down: off the road, unclipped, one foot on the lip of a ditch. He is back on the tarmac and back on the wheel before the loss is worth measuring, and the two of them settle into a headwind with the chase still behind them.

6. 6At the line

   Two into Castelló

   They hold it all the way to the coast and the day comes down to a two-up sprint, which goes the way the two-up sprint at Il Lombardia went in 2022. Pogačar takes his third stage in six days; Mas takes second place and, with it, second overall. Debruyne, out since dawn, is third at forty-six seconds and eighth on GC by nightfall.

The result