Five key moments that defined the 2023 Vuelta a España

The 2023 Vuelta a España will be remembered for Jumbo-Visma’s dominance and historic victory and a career-defining triumph in Madrid for Sepp Kuss. 

Jumbo-Visma became the first team to win all three Grand Tours in a single season and were the first in nearly 60 years to take a clean sweep of all three top GC positions in a Grand Tour thanks to Kuss, Jonas Vingegaard and Primož Roglič.

Yet if such a crushing display of power has to be recognised, they could not possibly have expected so many cards to fall their way, either in the Vuelta or in the 2023 Grand Tours.

Remco Evenepoel's dramatic exit from the GC battle on the stage to the Col du Tourmalet was probably the biggest factor that helped the Dutch team take such a devastating triumph, while the misfortune that struck other top rivals like Geraint Thomas of Ineos Grenadiers also played in their favour.

Jumbo-Visma were always in a position to make the most of their rivals' setbacks and bad luck and built their dominance day after day, tightening their grip on the race stage after stage.

The huge controversy of the final week, with the three leaders all in a position to win a race and the team then finally deciding to back Kuss, highlighted how Jumbo-Visma came close to being victims of their own success. 

The team leadership soap opera produced some of the most memorable moments of the 2023 Vuelta and blew-up social media, but that shouldn't in any way take away from the scale of Jumbo-Visma's achievements out on the roads of the Vuelta and at the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France.

These are Cyclingnews' five key moments that defined the 2023 Vuelta.

Sepp Kuss wins stage 6 at the Javalambre Astronomy Observatory

For an encapsulation of the entire Vuelta a España, you could do worse than watch stage 6, which rolled across the sierras of Teruel in southern Spain before concluding on the summit finish of Javalambre. 

It was a tactical masterpiece on Jumbo-Visma's part and, with hindsight, where the biggest foundation stone in their overall victory arch was laid.

After an utterly anarchic first three hours of racing, Jumbo-Visma emerged the clear collective winner, placing no less than four riders in a mass breakaway of 35, including Sepp Kuss. 

Interestingly enough, Kuss said later that with numerous GC outsiders in the move, including Mikel Landa (Bahrain Victorious), Marc Soler (UAE Team Emirates) and Romain Bardet (DSM-Firmenich), the team were not aiming to create too large a time gap but just test Soudal-QuickStep.

The end result proved far more successful than that for Jumbo-Visma, and the stage win by Kuss was only one of the multiple benefits.

With a three-minute advantage at the foot of the Javalambre, Kuss' explosive acceleration some six kilometres from the summit saw the American soar away from the rest of the field and solo to his second Vuelta stage win. 

The way Kuss slowed before the finish to soak up the fans' applause with high-fives along the barriers indicated that his interest in taking the GC lead was not a priority. Yet Kuss was suddenly second on GC behind Lenny Martínez (Groupama-FDJ) and in a position to fight for la roja should he want to.

In other ways, the outcome of the stage mirrored the different GC battles of the days to come. Roglič and Vingegaard showed very strong form themselves, dropping all their GC rivals. 

2022 podium finisher Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) lost seven seconds, João Almeida, 14, and triple overall runner-up Enric Mas (Movistar) was 24 seconds adrift. Undoubtedly the most interesting case, though, was Remco Evenepoel. The Soudal-QuickStep leader lost a relatively significant 32 seconds after struggling mid-mountain.

It was a pattern that was to be repeated again on a much bigger scale for all of Jumbo-Visma’s opponents in the Pyrenees. The cracks in the overall began to emerge in Javalambre. 

Kuss was the hero for one day, but the American’s first unexpected move into the limelight was underway.

Kuss does far better than expected in the time trial at Valladolid

Remco Evenepoel was not the only one offering congratulations to Sepp Kuss after his time trial at Valladolid, one which the American later said “went ten times better than I could have expected.”  

Kuss took the red jersey off Martínez at Xorret de Catí on stage 8 to enjoy the first Grand Tour leadership of his career and the first in any stage race since the 2018 Tour of Utah. He was widely expected to lose at least two minutes to Evenepoel or more on the flat, medium-distance TT round Valladolid. But that didn’t happen, and Evenepoel was only able to regain just over a minute on Kuss. 

The American still enjoyed an advantage of 1:09 seconds on the Belgian, with Roglič - who defended himself far better against Evenepoel than in the equivalent 2022 Vuelta time trial - further back at 1:36. 

Vingegaard, meanwhile, was nowhere near his remarkable Tour de France time trial performance, losing over a minute to Evenepoel and only pulling back 11 seconds on Kuss.  

Kuss became Super Kuss and was still very much in the GC battle. He failed to buckle under the pressure of leading the third biggest stage race in the world ahead of his own team leaders.

“Unless the wind blows hard today and some major gaps are created, the Vuelta a España starts here,” observed Miguel Indurain to Cyclingnews before the time trial began. His words proved more than correct.

Remco Evenepoel disintegrates on the Tourmalet stage, Jumbo-Visma soar

“When you try and give everything, there are no regrets,” Remco Evenepoel wrote on Instagram after stage 13. 

Yet such was the scale of Remco Evenepoel’s defeat in the Vuelta’s toughest day in the Pyrenees, with a jaw-dropping loss of 27 minutes to his rivals, the world of cycling was left asking if the Belgian’s GC ambitions in future Grand Tour were realistic.

The doubts about Evenepoel’s time loss were exacerbated because he seemed to have no idea what had caused it. The team appeared baffled and clueless that such a bad day could happen, too. 

There was no sickness or illness as a cause, while Evenepoel simply suggested “the tank was empty.” He later put it down to possibly over-racing, excessive travelling or a more complicated, less ordered build-up to the Vuelta via the World Championships that came after COVID-19 took him out of the Giro and forced him to redesign his 2023 goals. 

The contrast between his pre-stage declarations - “I’m starting a new chapter. I’m curious”, and his appearance at the Tourmalet summit, enshrouded in a cloud of grim silence, nearly half an hour after Jonas Vingegaard had won the stage, was huge. 

Even if Evenepoel’s redemption in the stages that followed was a sign of major mental and physical resilience, Soudal-QuickStep are already talking about reducing his race programme prior to heading to the 2024 Tour de France. 

And there may yet be other knock–on effects. Short-term and from the point of view of the Vuelta, the consequences of Remco’s collapse were considerable. It ended his overall ambitions and also created a huge gap in the opposition to Jumbo-Visma’s dominance in the race. 

As Kuss himself put it in an interview with Marca, “In the first half of the race, we had Remco to face up to, but after the Tourmalet, we were lacking a great rival.”

Remco Evenepoel bounces back on the Bonaigua

If the Vuelta’s decision to award its Most Combative Rider Prize to a certain Belgian in Madrid on Sunday was hardly difficult to predict, Remco Evenepoel’s actual resurgence in the race, less than 24 hours after his greatest defeat, was certainly not expected.

Some thought he might quit the race or at least struggle to recover.   

But on stage 14 of the Pyrenees, Evenepoel produced one of the most memorable breakaways of the season and duly confirmed that rather than throw in the towel, he was determined to keep on fighting in the 2023 Vuelta a España.

When he cracked and distanced Romain Bardet (Team DSM-Firmenich) with four kilometres to go on the climb to the Bonaigua summit finish, Evenepoel did not dispel the questions about his spectacular defeat but it he did start a new chapter of his race in the role of stage hunter, and it was clearly one that he relished. 

The stage victory seemed to act like a liberation, and Evenepoel went on to chance his arm almost wherever he could, from the hills of Navarre to the Angliru and the sierras of Asturias and Madrid, and even down to the final, scintillating, breakaway in the Paseo de la Castellana on Sunday evening. 

Along the way, too, there was a conscious effort to build enough points to take the blue polka-dot mountains jersey. It was not the jersey he had come looking for but a prestigious award all the same. Evenepoel also took his third stage win at the Alto de la Cruz de Linares, making him the only rider to take victories in all three weeks of the Vuelta.

There were disappointments, most notably when a minor error likely cost him the win ahead of Wout Poels (Bahrain Victorious) at Guadarrama on Saturday, but in a final week that ran the risk of being a one-sided Jumbo-Visma show, Evenepoel provided other drama and interest. 

It also showed that, mentally, as he put it himself, “I’m kind of unbreakable.”

Jumbo-Visma finally back Kuss to win the Vuelta a España

Cycling, and especially Grand Tour racing, is a team sport where one rider eventually wins thanks to the sacrifices of their teammates, and this inherent contradiction is behind a lot of what makes it interesting. 

But when a team like Jumbo-Visma puts on a display of crushing GC dominance, with their three best riders in the top three positions overall, that inherent contradiction becomes an open invitation for an internal power struggle. That is what happened - almost - on week three of the Vuelta to the Dutch team.

Jumbo-Visma’s initial response to having such a collective GC stranglehold was to decide a free-for-all for all three leaders. But as Kuss said later, that 'strongest rider wins' strategy led to scenarios and images that were hard for the broader public to comprehend.

The sight of Vingegaard and Roglič thundering up the mist-enshrouded Angliru, leaving  Kuss trailing in their wake, provoked a storm of criticism. Their joint attack meant that Kuss relied on the indirect assistance of Mikel Landa to limit the damage and save his race lead from the aggression of his own teammates.

Given the scenario, the “samen winnen” - “winning together” slogan stuck on the back of the Jumbo-Visma team bus has arguably never been so close, at least metaphorically, to peeling off. And rightly or wrongly, in a subsequent team meeting in a hotel room prior to the following stage, this original free-for-all strategy was shelved.

As a way of defusing the drama.

It was perhaps the least risky option to take. The 'every rider for himself' policy would surely have made for a more dramatic, if controversial, third week of racing but also created deeper scars inside the team.  

While the pros and cons of that decision will doubtless rumble on into 2024, Vingegaard’s pacing of Kuss on the Alto de la Cruz de Linares made it clear that the threat of an internal feud was over and the American's victory was all but decided if he could finish in Madrid. 

That allowed the spotlight to focus on the equally unprecedented scenario produced by the 2023 Vuelta a España: a single team winning all three Grand Tours in a single year and then filling the podium of the final race, too. 

Remco Evenepole and others provided daily entertainment but Jumbo-Visma absolutely dominated the race.