We are three stages into La Vuelta, and we already have spoonfuls of drama to help us stay satiated. It all started with the opening team time trial that saw two Visma-Lease a Bike riders narrowly miss the start, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot's Instagram rant, the team's revenge when Vos won stage 2, and Femke Gerritse's first WWT win and subsequent red jersey on stage 3.
With three stages down and four to go, there will be plenty more to discuss in the coming days, but can we actually call La Vuelta a "Grand Tour"? Let's discuss. But first ...
Racing wrap-up
The big race over the weekend was, of course, the start of the Vuelta. You can find a rundown of the opening team time trial and second stage on EscapeCollective.com, as well as coverage of the rest of the race by yours truly.
Elsewhere in the world, women lined up for smaller UCI races: Festival Elsy Jacobs (1.1), Gracia (2.2) and Tour de Bloom (2.2).
Festival Elsy Jacobs has been around since 2008. It started as a one-day event, then morphed into a two-day stage race in its fifth edition. In 2024, it turned into two one-day races back to back – Festival Elsy Jacobs à Garnich and Festival Elsy Jacobs à Luxembourg. In case you didn't know, Elsy Jacobs was a Luxembourgish road cyclist and the winner of the inaugural women's Road World Championship in 1958.
As is usually the case with this race, the start list contained a nice mix of WorldTeams, some with their younger riders, ProTeams, and Continental teams. SD Worx-Protime was in attendance with Marie Schreiber, Luxembourg's national champ. Other WorldTeams at the race were Uno-X Mobility, Visma-Lease a Bike, Roland and Ceratizit. Canyon-SRAM Zondacrypto, Liv AlUla Jayco and AG Insurance-Soudal sent their development teams.
The first race, Festival Elsy Jacobs à Garnich, was a 113 km race that covered one 18 km circuit four times before cutting left mid-circuit for four laps of a 10 km circuit featuring two climbs. The whole course was challenging, with barely any time to rest, but the final, smaller circuits were extra brutal. For that reason, it came as little surprise when Marta Lach of SD Worx-Protime took home the victory from a select group of five. Giulia Confalonieri (Uno-X Mobility) and Sarah Van Dam (Ceratizit) rounded out the podium.
Eva van Agt got the winning move going when she attacked with 3 km to go on the final ascent of the day; her Visma-Lease a Bike team had been the main instigators for the majority of the race. She took Lach and Van Dam with her, and Confalonieri and Margot Vanpachtenbeke of VolkerWessels caught up with the group of three soon after. Together, they worked to stay away from a chasing group of nine who finished only four seconds down, led by Noä Jansen of Liv AlUla Jayco.
Here is a full race replay (complete with commentary from none other than Luxembourgish LEGEND Christine Majerus).
Sunday's race, Festival Elsy Jacobs à Luxembourg, was on another challenging circuit course. Eight laps of a 15 km circuit, each circuit with a kind of series of climbs that build on top of each other. The race came down to a reduced bunch sprint won by Martina Fidanza of Visma-Lease a Bike.
The Dutch team again tried to take the race into their own hands from the word go. They had Van Agt up the road with Rebecca Koerner of Uno-X Mobility for a while, but the two were pulled back in, and a larger breakaway that included Lach attempted to slip away. It was for nought, and the race came down to a reduced group. Fidanza took her first victory since signing for Visma at the start of the season.
The 25-year-old joined the Dutch team after three years with Ceratizit. She won two stages of the Thüringen Ladies Tour last season and has scored a handful of podiums in lower-level races like Scheldeprijs and Veenendaal-Veenendaal.
Valentine Fortin (Cofidis) finished second, and Barbara Guarischi of SD Worx-Protime took third. A race replay (again with Majerus) can be found here.
Elsewhere in Europe, Alison Jackson (EF Education-Oatly) was winning Gracia, a 2.2 in Czechia, after taking the lead from VolkerWessels' Marieke Meert in the stage 3 individual time trial. Meert won the opening stage and Jackson won stage two, but it was only after the third stage that the EF rider could claim the leader's jersey. She held it as Marion Norbert Riberolle (Fenix-Deceuninck devo) won the fourth stage, and Christina Bragh Lorenzen, on the club team Friis ABC ACR, won the fifth and final stage. Jasmin Liechti of Nexetis took second overall, ten seconds behind Jackson, and Karolina Kumiega (KDM-Pack) third, 11 seconds down.
Finally, there was a UCI race happening in Washington state in the USA! This is a huge deal because most of the UCI races stateside have gone away. Joe Martin Stage Race was the most recent major loss for the American cycling scene, and at this point, the Tour of the Gila is the only other UCI-sanctioned stage race left standing the one-day Maryland Cycling Classic was added this year).
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