2023-12-19 23:02:52
Not even the call of the Covadonga Lakes, the ultimate icon of the race, allows us to fully focus attention on the 79th edition of the Vuelta a España, which was presented this Tuesday. The race will start in Lisbon on August 17 and will end in Madrid on September 8. The Spanish round will have a route faithful to its personality of recent years, with few flat stages, nine high finishes and a measured toughness to seek the spectacle that the hegemony of the Jumbo took away in 2023. The race will return to Euskadi, with a stage in Álava last week.
Lisbon will host the start of the Vuelta a España, as it did in 1997 when it became the. first foreign city to organize the start of the test. The inaugural stage will be a 12-kilometer time trial and the peloton will spend three days on Portuguese roads before heading to Extremadura in the fourth stage, a mountain day with a finish line at Pico Villuercas, which returns to the Vuelta after its debut in 2021.
Internationalization is a clear bet for major events. In addition to Lisbon, the Vuelta has taken place in previous editions of Assen (2009), Nimes (2017) and Utrecht (2022). In 2022 the three grand tours started from different countries: the Giro in Hungary, the Tour in Denmark and the Vuelta in the Netherlands. The Tour has not left France since 2021 and will not do so again until 2025.
Measured hardness
The Vuelta 2024 is looking for a successor for Sepp Kuss (Jumbo) with a route of calculated hardness starting with the Extremaduran routes, with the arrival at Pico Villuercas. The culmination of the first week will be two dangerous stages, first a mid-mountain day between Úbeda and Cazorla and, later, a high mountain day between Motril and Granada with three first-class ports.
In the second week, the Vuelta will get really serious. The Manzaneda station will host the 12th stage, in the second of the three days along the always dangerous Galician routes, which will culminate in the 13th with the finish line in the port of Ancares on a new slope. The second week of the race will end that Sunday with the arrival at the fearsome Cuitu Negru.
After the second day of rest, the Covadonga Lakes will arrive, returning to the Vuelta three years after Primoz Roglic’s triumph in 2021. The Asturian menu seems decisive, once again.
After crossing Cantabria, the race will return to Euskadi with the stage between Vitoria and Maeztu, to head into the final stretch with the Logroño-Alto de Moncalvillo and Villarcayo-Picón Blanco days before reaching Madrid, where the end of the Vuelta changes shape radical and the usual party for the winner becomes a potentially decisive time trial.
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