Who would have thought it? Just two days after it seemed that Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) had moved into pole position to secure yet another Vuelta a España overall victory, the GC battle has abruptly yawned wide open, and the triple Vuelta winner will likely have a fight on his hands of major proportions in his bid to take a fourth.
The Vuelta is always good at producing unexpected developments - how many people would honestly have had Sepp Kuss as the overall winner before 2023, for example? But the events of stage 6 of the 2024 race were unexpected in anyone's book. A gutsy, long-distance break by Ben O’Connor - previously two minutes down on GC and trying for a stage win at least initially - has now put the Australian into the overall lead as well. And by a considerable, potentially race-winning, margin to boot.
The comparisons with O'Connor's situation and Kuss getting in a seemingly inoffensive first-week break in 2023 and then going on to win outright are valid, of course. But given the precedent of 2023 - and presumably teams being more than aware of such risks since then - surely makes it harder to comprehend that a similar scenario should develop again, and with a rider with a much better GC track record to boot.
But this is the situation: after dropping a jaw-dropping total of six and a half minutes on O'Connor in a single stage, the Slovenian has now dropped to second, 4:51 back on the new race leader. By any standards, the rise of O’Connor into the top spot constitutes a troubling, and potentially very major, setback for Roglič.
Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe Sports Director Patxi Vila admitted directly that while they had always planned to keep the Australian under control in the day-long break using Roglič’s teammate Florian Lipowitz. But as Vila told Spanish television, “Things got out of hand".
“Things didn’t play out as we wanted. The start was really fast-moving and the break of the day [containing O’Connor, Lipowitz and 11 others) was a really strong one. Lipo was in there, and we thought he would have no problem staying with Ben and we’d get another option on GC,” Vila said.
Lipowitz did his best and thanks to his third place on the stage, and moved up to fourth overall. But crucially, when O’Connor attacked, Lipowitz could not follow and suddenly, as O’Connor stepped up the pressure to unexpectedly high levels, Red Bull’s seemingly unbreakable superiority with their main GC man, Roglič, began to fall apart at the seams.
“What O’Connor did was incredible, I’ve rarely seen that,” Vila said, explaining that he had underestimated the Australian enormously. “Going up the last climb he just didn’t lose any time. I would never have expected that it’s a real surprise.
“The idea was that Lipo’s presence in the break would get the other teams working, because they wouldn’t like us getting another rider up there on GC. But then with O’Connor being so much stronger than I thought, it all got out of hand.”
Plan did not work
Lipowitz admitted that initially the Red Bull plan had been to let a move go without any of their riders in it, with Roglič already stating on Wednesday that he’d be happy to ‘loan’ the lead to a non-GC threat.
“But then there were a lot of moves on the climb so I followed there and in the end we messed things up a bit in a break,” the German explained.
“Nobody was working, there were a lot of attacks and sadly I wasn’t in Ben’s move. I had super-good legs and I’m happy with my shape. But I could have done more.
“In the end, we just missed out on Ben’s move and everybody was looking each other. He just went.”
Roglič himself paused briefly to talk to reporters, but after such a difficult day for his team, he was not in the most communicative of moods.
“We can't control everything and I said yesterday [Wednesday] that the plan was to let a break go,” he said. “Florian did a nice job, it was tricky with slippery descents so I can be happy about that.”
However, the million-dollar question of how dangerous a rider like Ben O’Connor could be GC-wise drew an even shorter response. “We will see at the end of a race,” Roglič said, then quickly threaded his way through the tangle of riders at the finish line heading away to the team bus.
As for where Red Bull go from here with 15 stages still remaining, Vila was adamant that all was not lost But he admitted that beating the Australian would be a wearing down process, rather than hoping to see O’Connor collapse suddenly.
“Little by little, bit by bit, we’ll have to do what we can. There’s a long way to go, the good thing is the team is strong so that’s another plus.
“Today was a bad day, a situation we couldn’t control. But we hope we can turn it around.”
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