Only 10km left today of the Santiago de Compostela mini-time trial at the end of the Vuelta, but Alberto Contador, to avoid surprises, gave his rivals the final blow yesterday by triumphing on top of Puerto de Ancares, the last steep difficulty that could bring Postolero's final victory back into play. Chris Froome tried several times, with his now famous smoothies, to detach the red jersey when the gradients, especially the initial ones, touched 18% but Contador never lost sight of the Kenyan-white wheel. A spasmodic and fascinating finale between two champions who battled it out in these three weeks of the grande Vuelta to forget the unfortunate Tour.
Froome blocked, Contador only allowed Rodriguez, further away in the standings, to make the usual shot in the search - always nuanced - for a stage victory but when Purito returned to the ranks and Froome restarted in an extreme attempt to subvert the hierarchies of the standings, Contador was deadly in his tail and then left him in the lurch with a decisive sprint in the last kilometre. The Vuelta was truly over. Froome, nodding his head and swinging his legs, proudly tried to close the gap but couldn't do it: what's more, disturbed during the run-up by an object thrown into the air by a fan, he arrived 16" behind the winner in Red shirt.
Valverde was third at 57", then Rodriguez at 1'18" ahead of Aru. For Contador it is the third Vuelta, a success that leads him to equal the trio in a row of both Tony Rominger (1992-93-94) and Roberto Heras (2002-03-05). Heras also won a fourth Vuelta in 2005 and would still have held the victories record had it not been confirmed positive two months after the end of that edition in the counter-analysis relating to an anti-doping control resulting in a two-year disqualification and revocation of success in the Spanish race with the Russian Denis Menchov winner by default.
For his part, Contador also achieved a very special record: three victories out of three career participations in the great Iberian race. The Pistolero thus erases the painful image of his retirement from the Tour with a peremptory affirmation that relaunches him to the top of world cycling after the disappointing 2013. The season sees three big names at the top of the rankings of the three most important stage races: the Giro with Nairo Quintana, the Tour with Vincenzo Nibali and the Vuelta with Contador. The only one of the greats to stay dry, against all odds on the eve, was Froome.
The only regret of a beautiful season for cycling is that it has never been possible to have a stellar four-way confrontation both in Italy and in France and Spain: in the Giro Quintana, a great grimpeur, defeated the field but was only faced with a evanescent Evans and a Rigoberto Uran. At the Tour swept up by Nibali, Quintana was not there and Froome and Contador immediately dropped out of the race and dropped out when there were still no Alps and Pyrenees to climb; at the Vuelta, where all the big names had met except Nibali, a terrible carom in the time trial of la Borja and a fall with broken collarbone in the following stage made Quintana throw in the towel who was already in Red shirt.
The Contador seen these days would perhaps have won the same as they say about Nibali in the Tour: bad luck and crashes are part of the cyclist's job. No one is free. But the lack of confrontation in fact disappoints the expectations of the eve. The confrontation between Contador and Froome, on the other hand, ends with a reversal of hierarchies with the Spaniard making a comeback and the Briton who is instead starting to close an opaque and unfortunate season with only two victories in the second and third brackets (Tour de Romandie and Giro of Oman), a 2014 for the Team Sky captain who deposits a lot of rust on the dazzling 2013 and accumulates a few too many worries about the year to come.
