Vuelta a Espana Stage 20 - Preview

The beautiful and often bypassed – by visitors as well as the Vuelta – mountain wilderness of the Sierra de Gredos is the setting for the final battleground. The stage should be a cracker, with half a dozen climbs on the itinerary, two of which featured in one of the most celebrated days of racing in the Vuelta's history, when Bernard Hinault, aided by Grand Tour debutant Laurent Fignon, torched race leader Julián Gorospe's hopes in 1983, with "The Badger" going on to claim his second victory in Spain's national tour.

From the start in Arenas de San Pedro, the riders will cover little more than a dozen kilometres before starting to climb. Ahead of them, there's barely any flat for the next 175 kilometres. First up is the first-category Puerto de Pedro Bernardo, long at 18.4km, but steady. Above it lies the nine-kilometre drag of the Puerto de Serranillos, where Fignon's pace-making put Gorospe into the red and Hinault finished him off, the Spaniard losing 20 minutes by the finish.

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Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014). 

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