Barring an accident, American Sepp Kuss will win his first Tour of Spain on Sunday and offer his Jumbo-Visma team a historic hat-trick in the Grand Tours this year.
The 20th stage, won on Saturday by the Dutchman Wout Poels in Guadarrama, did not bring any change to the general classification where Kuss still precedes his teammates and usual leaders Jonas Vingegaard and Primoz Roglic with respectively 17 seconds and 1 min 8 sec ahead .
The final stage, which looks like a parade on Sunday evening on a street circuit in Madrid, should definitively freeze these positions. The three men crossed the line arm in arm to already celebrate their triumph.
“It was a very special moment to experience that with my two teammates. I’m almost there,” Kuss savored after falling into the arms of his wife.
By placing three riders in the first three places, the Jumbo-Visma armada carries out an unprecedented raid on the Vuelta since the Kas-Kaskol team in 1966.
Winning the three Grand Tours in the same year, after Roglic’s victory in the Giro and Vingegaard’s victory in the Tour de France, is an even greater achievement. Even super powers like Banesto, Sky or, in the more distant past, Peugeot, Renault Gitane, Molteni or Bianchi had lost their teeth there.
That victory went to Sepp Kuss, the first American to win a Grand Tour since Chris Horner in 2013 already at the Vuelta, is unexpected insofar as the “kid from Durango” is usually confined to a teammate role.
From teammate to leader
This year he helped Vingegaard win a second consecutive Tour de France and Roglic win the Giro. Dedicated and enduring, he is the only rider in the entire peloton with the Spaniard Luis Leon Sanchez to have participated in the three Grand Tours this year.
Also at the Vuelta, Kuss, 29, had left to fulfill his role as lieutenant in the mountains as usual. But after taking the leader’s red jersey during the 8th stage, he suddenly found himself in the shoes of a leader, throwing confusion within his team who, faced with a very unusual situation, did not know how to reconcile the ambitions of his leaders with the emergence of their best assistant.
A few days of uncertainty followed until team boss Richard Plugge decided at a summit meeting on Wednesday evening: it would be Sepp Kuss.
This decision may have particularly offended Roglic, who was aiming for a fourth Vuelta and who seemed to have difficulty accepting the choice of his team. “It’s normal, they’re athletes and they all want to win, but we won together,” commented Richard Plugge, using his team’s motto, plastered on their bus.
The absolute domination of the Dutch team inevitably raised suspicions in a sport long plagued by doping cases, but without any concrete evidence to demonstrate the slightest cheating, mechanical or otherwise.
A few whistles from the public also accompanied their success on Saturday.
Supremacy
Faced with the same accusations during the Tour de France which he flew over, Jonas Vingegaard assured that he did not take any product that he would not give to his daughter.
To explain this supremacy, the management insists on the excellence of its preparation and its equipment as well as attention to the smallest detail.
“Winning three Grand Tours may seem crazy, but we set big goals for ourselves in this team. It stimulates and makes everyone progress,” Kuss underlined this week.
The team finished the Vuelta with five stage victories – 2 for Vingegaard and Roglic, 1 for Kuss.
On Saturday, the three Jumbos fearlessly controlled a stage with ten climbs behind the day’s breakaway in which Wout Poels showed himself the strongest to beat Remco Evenepoel in the sprint, ten minutes ahead of the peloton.
Title holder, Evenepoel had slipped in the Tourmalet stage a week ago, losing all his chances for the general. He made up for it by winning three stages and the best climber jersey.
But the Belgian prodigy has not removed all doubts about his ability to withstand the repetition of long mountain passes, while he must discover the Tour de France in 2024.