Why I Love: The Vuelta

The Tour has the prestige, and the Giro has the veritas. The Vuelta has… a bunch of mad bastards. It’s the Grand Tour for people who don’t take themselves too seriously, and that’s what I love about it.

Agents of chaos

The Tour de France is a curated mess. I’m sorry. Whether it’s the routine formula of the Leblanc era or the misplaced boomer nostalgia under Prudhomme, the Tour’s routes are curated with a cynical intent for storytelling about nation and sporting narratives.

The Vuelta, on the other hand, is composed with absolutely no forethought at all. You’ll have David Millar stepping off his bike in protest at the brutality of the Angliru one year, then the next a weird 20km climb that flattens three times and is won by a 22 year old Spanish sprinter who’ll be banned by the time he’s 27.

Summit finish on Stage 2? Sure, why not? We’re not worried that this will ruin the entire race, because, as mentioned, this race isn’t designed with a sporting contest in mind. Thanks to something called conditioning, which we don’t understand because we’re just the people throwing darts at a map of Spain, that dude who wins on Stage 2 is fucked by the time you make him ride a downhill time-trial on an active volcano for Stage 14 anyway.

It’s “if you build it they will come,” but instead of being about building a baseball field for ghosts, it’s about closing a bunch of random roads in Spain and trying to pay attention long enough to see who’s the first person to finish riding them all.

The Vuelta was so famous for its pointless stages along only semi-deserted Spanish motorways that Cycling Weekly once went as far as calling for it to be reduced to just two weeks. But the Vuelta don’t care. Motorways, volcanoes, random time-trials. Whatever. Fifteen-year-olds have uploaded half-assed Dungeons and Dragons map generators to GitHub that have more thought put into their routes than our sport’s third Grand Tour.

Performance Enhancers

OK, there are a lot of performance enhancing substances at the Vuelta. It’s historically the no-rules, gung-ho race that combines my eternal favorites of pot Belge and a failed fascist state. But I’m not really talking those things here. I talk about them a lot. But not here.

No, I mean… everything else. The passion and technology that drives us forward. Manolo Saiz screaming “Venga venga venga” so loud that even Eurosport’s commentary team can’t talk bollocks over it. The arms race over directeurs sportif who can shout “venga” loudest is almost as entertaining as the racing itself.

There’s always something else too. Helicopters flying too low between Spanish riders and foreign contenders. Sticky bottles. Motorbikes in the way. Fans up to no good. It always seems to play out so much more publicly in the Vuelta. Hell, sometimes the team cars crash into their own riders just for the fun of it.

And it’s a place where new technology sneaks out into the world. Every sponsor finds a way to push out something special to close out the racing season. Way back in 2003, the halcyon days of the gold leader’s jersey, Isidro Nozal rocked up to the final time-trial with the most performance enhancing object we’ve ever seen in pro-cycling: a gold-black Giant time-trial bike to celebrate the legendary ONCE team’s final race, and its final Vuelta victory (the latter celebration was somewhat premature). That’ll never be topped, but you know there’s going to be some extreme cable technology breakthrough that saves 20 Watts over a 3,500km race and is quickly adopted by every under-15 racer on the British circuit even though it costs £900.

The Jerseys

Spanish graphic design is astoundingly bad.

The absolute best-case of Spanish graphic design is a guy throwing two random colors onto a flat surface and then putting a multicolored logo on top of it. The worst? Well, one time I was hungover as shit after a Team Sky training camp in Palma and the junk food packaging I bought from the local supermarket somehow looked more like vomit than the actual vomit it held off.

The Vuelta’s wildcard teams have a racing budget that basically amounts to handfuls of pesetas discovered in a team car’s glovebox from before the country shifted to the Euro. When you combine that with Spanish graphic design, you get something that looks like it was made in MS Paint by a guy with a trackball mouse that hasn’t been cleaned since 1994. Or, for the consultants out there, by every client who has strong ideas about his branding and just needs it making bigger for his website.

To design a Spanish team’s jersey, simply pick a random province, a regional bike manufacturer, and a crisp company that inexplicably has a parrot for a logo. Empty all their brand colors into a shotgun and shoot it at some lycra.

The Racing

The Giro is weighed down by an inferiority complex from being the first grand tour chronologically but only the second in terms of prestige. And the Tour is the Tour, a bloated mess designed to sell Laughing Cow cheese to people from Surrey. But the Vuelta is just kind of… there. There are no expectations. It’s a race that’s taken off the shoes that bind it to the world, and it floats high as a kite, like we all would if we didn’t have to spend the working day going through the minutiae of a £20,000 contract with GCN.

And yet somehow that blissful, responsibility-free background doesn’t result in mediocre racing that nobody cares about. I mean, there is a whole lot of half-arsed racing along empty motorways, and in the grand scheme of things people care about it’s somewhere below “How come you don’t see white dog shit any more?” But. But the racing really is fun. The leader’s jersey changes hands. Various attack-minded riders find advantages on different terrains, somehow retroactively instilling a method to the race organizers’ madness as an unpredictable competition unfolds.

It turns out that cutting out the Type-A Tour de France bores who can predict their glucose metabolic rate down to the nearest second, and then setting loose the mad bastards that remain onto the sides of a bunch of steep mountains, is a great way to create an entertaining bike race. Which, on reflection, is actually brutally obvious.