To all potential aspirants for winning a major mountain stage of the Vuelta a España like Sepp Kuss (Jumbo-Visma) did at the Javalambre summit finish this Thursday, here’s one key piece of advice: don’t move house after the Tour de France.
That’s what Kuss did in 2022, and as the North American recounted after taking his second Vuelta summit finish victory and third Grand Tour win of his career, it did no good at all to his chances of preparing properly for the Spanish race last year, which he abandoned after a week after falling ill.
Asked if the 2023 victory constituted a kind of sporting revenge for his difficult Vuelta last year, Kuss told reporters it partly did, but also recounted that his ill-timed house move and sickness had been what had spurred him to “focus on the basics”, before the 2023 Vuelta a España - his third Grand Tour of the season after helping Primož Roglič to victory in the Giro d'Italia and Jonas Vingegaard at the Tour de France.
That strategy certainly seemed to pay off brilliantly on Thursday, as Kuss soared away from the remnants of a massive breakaway some four kilometres from the line to take a hugely-impressive solo win and come within seconds of taking the overall lead.
“It was an incredibly hard stage, we wanted to try to go in the breakaway just to test QuickStep and we knew it would be a hard day to control,” Kuss said.
“That was the primary objective and we were in there with Dylan [Van Baarle], Jan [Tratnik] and Attila [Valter], and they rode super-good. I have to thank them a lot for the work they did. The whole day I felt super, super good.”
As for his own strategy, he said, “I was only thinking about when to go and when to try to make the difference. The whole way up the climb, I was just enjoying the environment we have in the Vuelta, it’s always a special race for me.”
Taking such an important win at Javalambre was in contrast to his ill-fated 2022 participation, which began to skew when he got overly involved in moving house after the Tour de France last summer, he said.
“At the time it didn’t seem so difficult, but I spent two weeks doing projects around the house, and everything that goes with moving, so I didn’t have the time properly recover from the Tour. Then at the Vuelta I got very sick after 7 or 9 stages,” leading to his abandon.
This time around was a very different story, he said. “I tried to recover as well as possible after I did the Tour and focus on the basics, which isn’t always easy to do. But I ended up feeling better between the Tour and the Vuelta than I did between the Giro and the Tour.”
The presence of numerous GC threats in such a big breakaway both boosted its chances of staying away, but as Kuss pointed out, Jumbo-Visma were none too keen for the move to gain too much time on the road to Javalambre.
“Guys like Martínez who are in the break and [Marc] Soler and others - we didn’t want the move to go to six minutes, because [Lenny] Martinez is a rival for the podium and perhaps the overall win.”
Having won by 26 seconds ahead of the Frenchman at Javalambre, Kuss is now within sight of the red jersey, trailing Martinez by just eight seconds. A first-ever spell in the lead of a Grand Tour for the Colorado climber may yet come his way on the Xorret de Cati ‘wall’ on Saturday.
And while Kuss repeatedly stated “no” when asked if he was interested in going for the overall himself rather than working for Primož Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard, he did not completely rule out trying to take it over the weekend.
“Let’s see what happens, tomorrow is an easy day. Cati is much tougher and probably good for a break and I’m not sure if I could get in another one after today,” he pointed out.
“I can be happy with this victory, and we also have two very strong leaders who are going to fight for the overall.”
While Martínez is the youngest ever leader of the Vuelta, should Kuss finish the Spanish race, he will become the first rider to complete all three Grand Tours in a single year since Thomas de Gendt in 2019. And if his Javalambre success makes the Vuelta a huge triumph on a personal level, after riding the Giro and Tour, surely even more so.
That said, taking the Vuelta outright with Vingegaard and Roglič is clearly the major goal for Kuss team, and as could be witnessed from his standout climbing domestique work on Monday in Andorra, Kuss himself is clearly heavily implicated in that.
On top of which there is Kuss track record of being part of the team on every Grand Tour that Jumbo-Visma have won since the 2019 Vuelta to bear in mind too.
As Roglič said before the Vuelta, “see the stats: if you want to win, you have to bring Sepp with you”. But at Javalambre on Thursday, that also proved to be the case for Kuss himself.
