He lost his bike with 3 kilometers to go due to a puncture, but that insignificant detail that would have left someone else in the ditch did not stop Kaden Groves (Alpecin) from achieving his second victory in this Volta a Catalunya. The Australian, winner two days earlier in Sabadell, hurried to abandon his work tool and race on top of a colleague a few centimeters taller than him. Without his usual work tool, his difficulty was much higher, but the bullet man of this Volta once again gave an account of his greatest rival in the finish line, Brian Coquard, this time with even greater ease.
With 20 minutes in advance, a suffocated and very reduced squad turned up in Molins de Rei. The stage covered from Martorell a winding terrain, full of twisty leg-breaking slopes that did not facilitate the passage of a peloton that accumulates a lot of fatigue. It was not noticeable at the cruising speed, close to 45 km per hour, with which they flew towards the finish line again, largely due to the umpteenth craziness of that wonder named Remco Evenepoel. The Belgian, totally desperate to beat Roglic, attacked when no one had done so to offer another show, even though he left empty once again.
The Belgian from Soudal woke up beaten in his pride. Accustomed to his stubborn ambition granting him victories without rest, Lo Port's second place hit him deep. He tried to encourage the organization by dressing him at the start with a barretina and offering him 'pa amb tomaquet'. But the wound is deep. "Maybe he shouldn't have counterattacked," Evenepoel said of the day before. “I started my sprint early and I think it was a big mistake. But it is not the end of the world, on the contrary, it is a valuable lesson from which I will learn for the next races”. He will have time to show this learning in future races, because in this Volta this young prodigy still listens to reason.
No one would have reproached him for not attacking on a day of transition. But the Belgian is always looking for blood, he always goes for the race. Not a day without a show. A blessing for current cycling, a constant penance for the peloton.
All power on the false flats, the one from Soudal is one of those rollers for whom pedaling costs half the effort of the rest of humans. He demonstrated it with a knife 200 meters from reaching the summit in the Alt de la Creu d'Aragall, second category, to which Roglic responded avidly. Marc Soler had thrown himself ahead, looking for some glory in his house, but the little cannibal had other plans for the race. After surpassing the man from Vilanova, he raised the psychological battle with the Slovenian again. Effervescent in the legs and in the mouth, he recovered the reproaches before the passivity to give the leader of the race a relief, much colder to enter into those provocations.
Evenepoel got tired of wearing himself out on his own and stopped. His annoyance was considerable. He was perhaps trying to psychologically wear down the Slovenian for future races. At the moment he seems far from achieving it. And so the peloton arrived to absorb them and finish with a duel that no one can doubt that will continue in the last stage, starting and ending in Barcelona.
