The Vuelta Climbs the Sierra de la Pandera on Saturday and Enric Mas Has Sixty-Three Seconds
Stage 14 runs 152 kilometres from Jaen to a summit finish. Mas leads Roglic by 1min 03sec and Felix Gall by 1min 20sec.
The Vuelta a Espana reaches the Sierra de la Pandera on Saturday, on a stage of a hundred and fifty-two kilometres from Jaen, and it is the first summit finish since the race lost the rider everyone had come to watch.
Tadej Pogacar won three stages and then crashed out on the eighth with clavicle and spine injuries that put him in hospital. What is left is a race between Enric Mas and Primoz Roglic, and Mas has been holding it.
After stage thirteen Mas leads by one minute and three seconds. Felix Gall is third at one minute twenty, Richard Carapaz fourth at three fifty-three, and Oscar Onley fifth at four forty-one. The gap between first and third is a great deal smaller than a climb like the Pandera can produce.
Stage thirteen itself went to the breakaway. Wout van Aert beat Valentin Paret-Peintre in a two-man sprint into Loja for his fourth Vuelta stage win, and extended a points classification lead that nobody is seriously contesting.
The Pandera is short by Vuelta standards and steep by anyone's, which is a combination that makes minutes rather than seconds. A rider defending sixty-three seconds on it does not have much room, and a rider chasing sixty-three seconds has every reason to attack early and often.
Mas has finished second at the Vuelta more than once and has never won a Grand Tour. He is thirty-one, he rides for a Spanish team, and this is the Spanish Grand Tour, which is a considerable amount of weight to carry up a mountain.