The aesthetics of cycling are rarely so direct, but one thing I've been struck by through the first 17 stages of a fantastic Vuelta a España is how great Primoz Roglic looks riding a bike. As the peloton churned up the ridiculous slopes of the Pico Villuercas, basically a paved goat path with the dimensions of a long Koppenberg, everyone was pedaling squares, yet Roglic was the epitome of calm, his chest never heaving, his posture less rigid than coiled, his balance indisputable. When Lennert Van Eetvelt opened up the sprint, he rocked violently over his bike, his right elbow jutting out every time he raised his right foot, while Roglic's head appeared to stay in the same place as he timed his leap to perfection and came around an already-celebrating Van Eetvelt to take the stage and the leader's jersey.
Unfortunately, another trademark of Roglic's career, as great as it's been, has been an outrageous run of bad timing and worse luck. Two days after his magnificent win, Roglic's team jeopardized his would-be redemptive Vuelta by spotting Ben O'Connor six and a half minutes worth of time. It's fine to cede the red jersey in the first week of a Vuelta, as the onus of protecting it looked to be an even more formidable task than usual due to the unrelenting heat that caused several prominent riders to abandon with heatstroke. They did not want to exhaust their whole team, strong as it was, putting out unthreatening fires and leaving their leader exposed during the harsh third week.
The problem was, they picked the wrong fire to let burn. O'Connor is a serious rider, a guy who finished fourth at a Tour de France and has top-10 finishes at every Grand Tour. Roglic's Red Bull team made the mildly forgivable error of letting O'Connor into a powerful breakaway, but they compounded their mistake by failing to mount a chase, as their own Florian Lipowitz was part of the move. Lipowitz is a cool rider who can do cool stuff—he's running ninth after Stage 17—not someone capable of a Sepp Kussian Grand Tour run. Speaking of Kuss, how could Roglic of all people not see the existential peril in letting a strong climber eat huge minutes on a seemingly innocent breakaway day? "Things got out of hand," Red Bull director Patxi Vila admitted, while Roglic echoed him, saying, "Today was a bad day, a situation we couldn’t control. But we hope we can turn it around."
Thankfully for racing fans, Red Bull's strategic blunder set up the fascinating dynamic of O'Connor trying to endure the redoubled pressure of a charging Roglic through the hairiest of mountain stages. O'Connor's Decathlon team, despite being French, has shown itself to be up for the fight, pushing a high pace to preemptively deter attacks some days, trying to get the pair of incredibly strong teams whose GC options have faded (Jumbo and UAE) to work, and controlling the road with such zest that they boxed Richard Carapaz all the way out.
It has worked, to a point, but Roglic has been too good. That's especially impressive given the nightmare Tour de France he had, where he spoiled high expectations by racing timidly then falling (again!) and cracking a vertebra. The best Vuelta racer of his generation, and maybe of all-time, has applied pressure on every steep stage and bested O'Connor every single time he's gone at him, and he picked up a ton of time before the race even hit the high mountains. Roglic won Stage 8 and put 46 seconds into O'Connor on the Category 3 finishing climb. Red Bull turned the screws on O'Connor three stages later and Roglic took 37 more seconds despite the flat finish. A friend noted that Roglic seems to ride best when he's in front, riding aggressively rather than defensively, and he provided two weeks' worth of data in support of that point across middling and toughish terrain.
Then the race hit the real mountains, and Roglic destroyed O'Connor. Across the Tejedo de Ancares, Cuitu Negru, and Lagos de Covadonga, Roglic took what would have been a 15-second lead over O'Connor—but is currently a five-second gap, after the Slovenian received a 20-second penalty for drafting (this was deserved, in my opinion, as he got a free ride from his team car not after a mechanical but after a planned bike change). Enric Mas, Richard Carapaz, and Mikel Landa have also all nipped after O'Connor, though Roglic has simultaneously distanced them too. O'Connor finally lost his grip on the fog-shrouded slopes of the Lagos de Covadonga. You could identify Roglic by his silhouette's perfect form.
Five seconds is nothing at this point in the race, given how much better Roglic has run than O'Connor for two weeks, how much work Decathlon has been forced to do already, and, most critically, the terrain to come. Two summit finishes precede the final time trial, though the final one is significantly more arduous. Six categorized climbs set the stage for the Picón Blanco, a ridiculous 8.3-kilometer pain arena with an average gradient of 9.2 percent and a maximum ramp of 18 percent. The gaps that pop up that day should be decisive ones, and even if they are not, Roglic can count on winning back at least one minute in the final time trial: O'Connor is a bad time-trialist, while Roglic beat the finest time-trialist of his generation by more than a minute to win Olympic gold in Tokyo.
Roglic's infamous last-day time-trial loss at the 2020 Tour shouldn't give anyone pause, as there's no Tadej Pogacar here to destroy him, and his decisive Giro win was a pretty comprehensive cleansing of demons. O'Connor is not out of the running, but he knows he's up against it. He gave a quote about knowing he was probably going to cede the jersey soon, though I was far more intrigued by something he said about what it's like to race against Roglic. "His demeanor in general comes across laid back," he said after Stage 17. "But I think he's pretty ruthless in how he goes about things, and he's very well aware of what his strengths are." This is a man who knows he's approaching an execution, which is what I too would expect if I were up against someone as locked-in as Roglic.
