You can't help noticing that the Volta a Catalunya always brings together a lot of riders with a lot of very different goals. Even within the GC group, there are not just those looking to do well in the Giro d'Italia, but riders focussed on the Tour de France, too.
Then of course there are those aiming at the Ardennes Classics, interested in doing first Catalunya and afterwards Pais Vasco, because that combination gives the climbers and punchy riders an extra edge for Amstel, Flèche and Liège.
The effect of all these different interests is to make the Volta a very tricky race to read, and one with its own, very special, kind of dynamics. This applies most of all on the first day: the GC riders' teams don't want to start chasing too early because it would reveal their objectives and mean they are then expected to chase all week. But also the sprinters' teams aren't always so interested in chasing down the breakaways either. This means Catalunya is normally very good for breakaways, too.
I won five times there, in fact, more than any other race and that included stage 1 in 2019. We'd talked about it already the day before in the team hotel, then on the stage itself, I got in a very early break, and I had the plan of having at least 3:15 on the top of the last climb – which I did, and then I knew I would make it to the finish.
That was because as usual on stage 1 of Catalunya, the GC teams were looking at each other and not wanting to commit, so it was up to the sprinters' squads to work, and I was doing 400 Watts on that last long climb of the day. 400 Watts is something I knew the three top sprinters present - Andre Greipel, Nacer Bouhanni and Alvaro Hodeg - wouldn't be able to match. So I was sure their teams wouldn't be able to go faster than me because they would have dropped their sprinters if they had.
That worked out well in the end, but that kind of success can only happen in races like Catalunya, with three or four real sprinters' teams, and where the rest of the squads don't want to work so soon.
It's true Catalunya is also a race with no pure sprint days, they're more designed for sprinters who can climb like Michael Matthews, and also you have real mountains stage and then some circuit races like in Barcelona. But that made it my favourite race to do because there is something for everybody – and, personally, as a breakaway rider you have more chances to win in other races, too.
The complete alternative - that a rider like Tadej Pogačar comes to Catalunya, like in 2024 and manages to win a huge number of stages - is occasionally possible. I wouldn't say UAE were training their Tour de France support train for him already in Catalunya last year, but they certainly clamped down on the breaks in a way that didn't happen in other editions. In that way, last year Catalunya became a test for July.
It's also true, whatever happens, that Catalunya is a very tough race. You don't send a rider to Catalunya who cannot climb well, and you can see that because if you ride a 20-minute climb at 400 Watts average in Catalunya, almost everybody is still there at the top. Only a few other events, like Pais Vasco, are like this, virtually nobody gets dropped at all, but in some other really big races, even in the Tour de France, when you go at 400 Watts, almost immediately 60 or 70 guys are dropped.
So that shows how high the level is at Catalunya. Maybe they should put a time trial into the route - I only did one individual TT in the 12 or 13 I raced - but I think the mountain top stages are definitely hard enough to make a real difference anyway. They don't really need anything else.
It's true that Catalunya sometimes used to get a bit lost in the Belgian media, with all the Classics going on at the same time. But in 2024 with Pogačar and in 2023 when Roglič and Evenepoel were there, suddenly that changed.
Back when I was winning stages, the Belgians were really quiet about it, they only thought it was just a small Spanish race. Then when Evenepoel took part, suddenly it was getting a lot of analysis in the media and they realised Catalunya had real mountain stages with 4,000 or 5,000 metres of climbing, sometimes snowing at the top, and was very hard to win. Even Evenepoel said it was one of the hardest week-long stage races he'd ever done and the climbers have to be almost at 100% just to have a chance of a good GC result.
And a quick mention, too, of the last stage round the Montjuic, which I won twice, and on its two different routes for the laps through the park, the easier one and the steeper one they brought in a few years ago. Normally, I'm not a big fan of circuits, but Montjuic is only uphill and downhill and that makes it special. For a breakaway rider, it's one of the easiest ones to do, because you know that in the bunch on a course like that, they can't push much harder than 400 Watts and they won’t regain so much time on the descents. So for a breakaway, if you had a gap of one minute and were able to keep pushing hard, you could maintain your advantage.
Then with the crowds on the Montjuic climbs, it's always really nice for the riders to race, too, while the spectators can both see the riders five or six times and see everybody suffering, too. So I think for the public, Montjuic is the best Volta stage to watch. I’m sure that's why there are always so many people there!
