Juan Ayuso put a brave face on losing the Volta a Catalunya race lead at almost the last possible moment to Primož Roglič on Sunday, following a spectacular final stage in which the Slovenian managed to launch an unstoppable late attack in Montjuic Park.
The last stage of the Volta a Catalunya with its multiple punchy laps through Montjuic always looks dramatic and is exciting to watch but rarely decides the race.
"It's a glorified criterium" was how one top sports director present at the race rather sniffily described it. However, Ayuso's ultra-slender advantage of just one second over Roglič before stage 7 presaged a very different plotline to usual. And when the Slovenian blasted off 22 kilometres from the line, his move proved fatal to Ayuso's chances of continuing his remarkable winning streak of the first part of 2024.
Roglič was a man on a mission and his determined solo effort was more than enough to keep the more disorganised chase at bay, all the way to the line. All this took place in a stage where Ayuso had already lost the lead early on in a bonus sprint, then regained it in the second.
But the drama heightened yet further when Roglič went clear on the toughest climb to Montjuic castle, in the closing three laps of six. Less than half an hour later and 22 kilometres further on, the final result was clearly in the Slovenian's favour.
"It was a very tough stage, very hard fought, but I couldn't do anything," Ayuso said afterwards. As for what went wrong, "It's been a bit of everything, but at the start of the hard part of the climb on each lap, I touched wheels with another rider and lost a lot of positions."
"When Bora saw that had happened, they immediately radioed through Roglic to attack. But in any case, the climb was too long for me and he had better legs than me."
The Tirreno-Adriatico champion then did his utmost to keep Roglič within reach, using first teammate Marc Soler and Adam Yates to try to bring back the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe leader. But it was to no avail and Ayuso, with only one second in his favour on GC, finally crossed the finish line at the back of a chasing group 19 seconds back. Game over.
"I didn't have the best legs, but the team helped me from the start," Ayuso said after the stage. "First we lost one intermediate sprint, then I won the next one so we were back in the lead, and that meant Bora had no choice but to play it offensively.
"I expected an attack by Roglič because the circuit was quite fast, I knew it was going to be the third last lap or the second last lap of them all. I knew it was not going to be the last lap, because that way if he didn't drop me on the first try, then he'd have a chance to try again."
"When he went for it, I managed to get back on Roglič's wheel after he attacked but by the top of the climb he had cracked me."
Ayuso is still only 22 so is on a very steep learning curve, and he said he had taken away one key lesson from his defeat. "It's never to let any other rider get between me and Roglič's back wheel," he explained after following the Slovenian up the climb in third place behind Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers).
"I should have been right behind. 20 metres from the top of the climb, Egan swung over, and if I hadn't been missing those two metres on Roglič, maybe I'd have been able to stay on his wheel."
"But as I say, he was too strong today for me so - chapeau to him."
"Roglic was simply better," Ayuso's team manager Joxean Fernández Matxín told Catalan TV. "There's nothing more to add than that, he deserves the victory. We always go out to win but this time we lost, and we just have to use this defeat to learn better for the future."
"Saturday was a very strange stage, and that affected things too," added Ayuso, referring to the semi-neutralisation on stage 6, which saw the Volta miss out on all its main climbs of what should have been its toughest day in the mountains.
"I think that had a knock-on effect, today's stage would have been very different if we'd come to it feeling more tired, but everybody was in the same situation, not just me."
Ayuso has labelled Roglič as the favourite for the Giro d'Italia, where the two will cross swords again, as well as facing many of their rivals from Catalunya. However, the Spaniard was adamant that his near miss in the Volta did not change his approach to the Italian Grand Tour, where he'll share the leadership at UAE Team Emirates with Adam Yates.
"I'm leaving here feeling calm, and I know where I made a mistake today, too" he concluded, "But I'm not saying what it was."
