He's still there. Despite multiple predictions that Ben O'Connor would lose the lead of the Vuelta a España on the horrendously steep Cuitu Negru ascent, the Australian fought tooth and nail to hang on to red for a tenth successive stage. And by the summit of the 18-kilometre monster climb, he remained narrowly on top of the classification.
Able to stay with the other favourites for the tough but more manageable lower slopes of Cuitu Negru, as soon as the GC group hit the ultra-steep final segment of the race, O'Connor was finally dropped by arch-rival Primoz Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) when the Slovenian powered away with teammate Florian Lipowitz.
While it was virtually impossible to see in the swirling fog exactly how O'Connor was faring on the last, crucial part of the ascent, by the summit he had only shed 39 seconds to Roglič. Roglič himself was not on the greatest of days, and - in a similar scenario to Hazallanas a week ago - the Slovenian was briefly dropped by Enric Mas (Movistar) before regaining contact close to the finish.
As a result of O'Connor's tenacious ride, when combined with the 20-second penalty Roglič subsequently received, he remains in the lead of the Vuelta a España GC standings by 1:03. The gap continues to narrow, therefore but as O'Connor pointed out afterwards, he's still in red, and "cycling's a fickle business, you never what can happen."
"I never really dreamed I could win the Vuelta," O'Connor said. "This year my goal was to finish on the podium of a Grand Tour and that podium objective for me is still well and truly open."
"And I've got the red jersey now, too, and I'll hold it for as long as I can. I tried to limit my loss today as long as I could and I'm still in the lead. Cycling's a fickle business, but if you have one bad day…if Primoz has a bad day, the gap might go out again. You never know."
O'Connor said he had been "pretty confident" he would hold the red jersey on Cuitu Neru, for the reasons he'd already outlined on Saturday evening. "On any long climb, I feel confident," he explained. "Today was filthy, the last 1.5 kilometres were disgusting and the final 500 metres were just ridiculous."
"So I wouldn't say it was enjoyable, but the part before those last 2.5 kilometres was actually really nice. QuickStep put down a good pace, [Mikel] Landa attacked, but I felt pretty good."
When it comes to climbs steep as the side of a house like the Cuitu Neru finale, there was no real strategy, O'Connor said. "With all that fog, too it's just - push as hard as you can. I knew it was roughly a 12-minute effort, but there's no point in looking at your numbers." As he jokingly added, "You're so buckled anyway, you're not pushing numbers you wish you could see!"
Run off at a blisteringly fast pace despite the 3,000+ metres of vertical climbing in just 144 kilometres, the whole stage, O'Connor recognised, had been an exceptionally tough one, culminating in "the hardest 1.5 kilometres I've ever done." He had had no idea, he said, that one GC victim of the prolonged overall battle had been his teammate Felix Gall, who was dropped from the lead group mid-stage and eventually slid to 21st overall.
"The first thing I knew about that was when the team radio said 'Valentin [Paret-Peintre, teammate,] wait for Felix, wait for Felix.' It was a bit out of the blue," he reflected, "But I guess it can happen in a Grand Tour."
He took advantage of T Rex-Soudal's drawn-out pursuit of Pavel Sivakov ((UAE Team Emirates), with the relentless speed set down by the Belgian squad on the limit of tolerable at times.
"They were really strong, I can't believe how the break managed to stay away in the valley. It was so fast, you couldn't have swapped off harder," he said. Their pace-setting had helped him. "It's not up to us to race every day. Pavel could have jumped Primoz, or Enric, too. It's in everyone's interests [to chase] at some point. It just depends on who bites first."
With Roglič closing in overall to just over a minute, as the Vuelta goes into the third week, the GC is now poised on a knife edge and as O'Connor says "I've just go to try and stay in there for as long as I can. But it can take just one little thing to derail your race."
"At the moment my 10 days in the jersey feel pretty special" and in fact, while Cadel Evans has won the Tour de France and Jai Hindley the Giro d'Italia, no other Australian prior to O'Connor has ever held a Grand Tour lead for so many successive days.
"So I'll just try to enjoy the [second] rest day for now," he concluded, "and enjoy not having yet another day where I've got to go out and race up some climbs."
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