Chris Froome takes to the start line of the Vuelta a España today and if he thought that winning the Tour de France had presented him with every possible challenge, he was mistaken. The staging of the opening team time-trial along gravel paths, across a beach and down the promenade on the Marbella seafront has been likened by one critic to “crazy golf on a bike”.
So alarmed were riders by the changes of terrain on the 7.4km route between Puerto Banús and Marbella, which includes plastic matting over the beach and a raised wooden walkway, that organisers were forced into an embarrassing late concession yesterday. The opening stage will remain a team event, but will not count towards the individual general classification.
Rider safety will be paramount for the main contenders as Froome returns to the business of Grand Tours less than a month after his historic triumph in France in the face of abuse from spectators and incessant insinuations about doping, which were based on little more than one decisive surge on a Pyrenean mountain.
As Froome rides through the crowds on the Marbella waterfront this evening with his Team Sky cohort, at least he can expect a large, boozy contingent of British supporters to be cheering him on. As for more doping questions, he will inevitably point to the physio-logical testing that he began last week, with a promise to release results later in the year.
Froome was one of many riders who had flagged up concerns over the opening stage but, that late chaos aside, the Vuelta has the potential to fascinate given a high-class field and a route of 13 hilly or mountainous stages and nine summit finishes to be raced in baking heat. Froome’s presence offers the prospect of a historic victory, as he seeks to become only the third rider — after Jacques Anquetil in 1963 and Bernard Hinault in 1978 — to pull off the Tour-Vuelta double in the same season.
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Alberto Contador’s struggles in the Tour on the back of his Giro d’Italia victory showed just how hard it is to contest three-week races back to back, and Froome’s form coming into this race is hard to gauge given that he has raced only lucrative Criterium races since his triumphant entry into Paris.
Froome was clinging on to his lead by the end of the Tour, as Nairo Quintana was closing the gap with every climb, and the diminutive Colombian will surely arrive in Spain with an attacking plan after leaving his efforts too late in France.
Contador is the only notable absentee from a line-up that includes two former winners in Alejandro Valverde and Vincenzo Nibali. The Italian’s Astana team bring notable depth in Fabio Aru, second in the Giro, and Mikel Landa, who was third and will hope to impress in his last race before joining Team Sky.
Froome’s support includes Geraint Thomas, who rides his first Vuelta after a hugely impressive Tour in which he looked capable of a top-five finish until running out of gas in the final days in the Alps. Mikel Nieve, Vasil Kiryienka, Christian Knees, Ian Boswell, Salvatore Puccio, Nicolas Roche and Sergio Henao make up the rest of the line-up.
Sir Dave Brailsford, the Team Sky principal, was always keen for Froome to ride the Vuelta because, with one eye on 2016, he believes that it is better to extend the season and hit the winter period still racing rather than rest up too early.
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Brailsford and his team will hope that Froome can improve on his second places at the Vuelta in 2011 — his breakthrough performance as a Grand Tour rider — and last year, but Sky’s approach will not be of the same intensity as for the Tour, when there had been months of detailed planning. Some stages will be reconnoitred only as the race rolls around Spain, and there is much to discover given that all nine summit finishes are new to the Vuelta.
This will be new territory for Froome too, if he finds himself chasing a second Grand Tour in the same year. Only nine cyclists have pulled that off.
Three stages to watch
Stage 11 Just as well that a rest day in Andorra precedes a brutal stage of just 138 kilometres but an eye-watering 5,200 metres of climbing, culminating in the final 15km ascent to Els Cortals d’Encamp. There must have been tougher challenges in the Vuelta, but no one can remember when.
Stage 16 The riders start climbing almost from the off in Luarca and do not finish until the summit of Ermita de Alba in the Cantabrian mountains, a 7km climb with an average of 11.2 per cent including what will feel to exhausted riders like a vertical finale.
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Stage 17 If Froome and Quintana are still rivals by the third week, the Briton will have a considerable advantage in an individual time-trial over 39km of flat road around Burgos.