Vuelta a Espana Stage 19 - Preview

This stage linking the home cities of two of Spain's Tour de France winners, Carlos Sastre and Federico Bahamontes, won't suit the climbers hoping to emulate this illustrious pair by capturing a Grand Tour victory. Instead, it offers what is almost certainly a final chance of success to those teams who don't have a GC contender or an in-form sprinter to bag a stage win before the Vuelta finishes in Madrid in two days' time.

Beginning in the spectacular walled city of Ávila, where Sastre set up home having been brought up in nearby El Barraco, it heads south initially, crossing the only classified climb, the third-category Alto de la Paramera. Passing through El Barraco on the descent, the route drops down onto the huge plateau south of Madrid, the altitude barely changing as it heads through El Tiemblo and San Martín de Valdeiglesias.

Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014). 

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