The abandonment of Enric Mas confirms that there will not be a Spaniard in the top ten of the Tour (even with the one from Artà things were complicated), a negative record for the last 25 years. It happened in the 1998 Tour, although with a necessary clarification: in that Tour the Spanish teams withdrew en bloc as a protest against the police intervention in the hotels. No Spanish runner arrived in Paris for this reason and it was not long before the Tour did not arrive.
Perhaps it is time to start looking towards the Women's Tour, which starts as a great innovation this Sunday in Paris. It has a route of 8 stages (four flat, two rough and two mountain) and 144 cyclists divided into 24 teams of 6 runners. The first stage will be held in Paris, on the Champs-Élysées circuit, hours before the arrival of the men's Tour for the last big sprint.
In the absence of final confirmation, there will be four Spaniards on the starting line and Mavi García, also from Mallorca, stands out especially, a 38-year-old expert cyclist, current Spanish road and time trial champion (she has achieved this double in the last three editions ) who recently finished third in the Giro d'Italia.
Then three other Spaniards will be in action, on the announced list. At Movistar, with the entire team dedicated to Van Vleuten, there will be Sheyla Gutiérrez from Rioja (28 years old), the only Spanish member of the blue team. In the BikeExchange appears the Gipuzkoan Ane Santesteban (31 years old), seventh in the Giro in 2020. And in the Ceratizit appears the youngest of the Spanish quartet, Sandra Alonso, 23 years old, born in Mexico but raised from a very young age in Torrevieja. Together with Mavi García, leader of the UAE, they form this block of Spaniards in the return to the forefront of the women's Tour, sponsored and organized by the classic Tour de France.
Mavi García, a cyclist from Marratxí, starts with podium aspirations, although she is one step below the big favorites. In all the forecasts, the Dutch Annemiek van Vleuten is cited as a rival to beat (she precisely just won the Giro with great brilliance) and her performance should give Movistar a totally renewed style and illusions. How well you need it.
