Nine months on after taking fourth overall in the Ruta del Sol, talented young Andalusian Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos Grenadiers) has returned to his home race and is looking set for an equally strong ride this February.
Already third overall in the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana earlier this year, when he took second place on the toughest stage behind overall winner Aleksandr Vlasov, (Bora-Hansgrohe), the 21-year-old was in the thick of the action on Thursday’s brutally tough, uphill finish on stage 2 at Ruta del Sol, finally taking sixth.
Born and raised just an hour’s drive further south in the coastal town of Almuñecar, Rodriguez recognised that his local knowledge of the Alcala del Real climb, which the Ruta also tackled last May and his teammate Ethan Hayter won en route to second overall, had been one key to his success.
Another, the Spaniard insisted, had been the impressive scale of support he’d received from Ineos Grenadiers, with teammates like Salvatore Puccio and Eddie Dunbar notable by their presence in the closing kilometres before Rodriguez took over.
“I knew this climb from last year,” Rodríguez told a small group of reporters on Thursday as he warmed down and waited for the podium in the shadow of Alcala la Real’s impressive castle overlooking the town. “It was shorter and we came up a different side.
“Positioning was very important on such a short and explosive climb and if you came in badly positioned, it’d be easy to lose that time and very difficult to get it back. But the team were really good during the whole stage, keeping me up there and then in the last part, I was in exactly the right position. But that was all thanks to them.”
Rodríguez said that the final fraught assault on the roads leading up to the castle walls by the riders had been “very fast, and came after a much steadier climb where there was a lot of tension, everybody wanted to be up there. That was very hard.
“Then in the last ascent, it was so steep, so it was basically the same and it was a question of getting up there as fast as you could.”
Now 11th overall at 11 seconds, and he said that while Friday and Saturday are likely to end in bunch sprints, surprises could not be ruled out. And on top of that, of course, is Sunday’s decisive finale in the sierras of north-eastern Andalucia.
“I just want to do as well as I can and get as good a result as I can in the overall,” he said. “You can’t ever rule out surprises, there’s a lot of climbing en route to those finishes and that’s going to make it a lot tougher.
“Valencia showed I can be up there. I don’t know if I will have the same legs here as I had too, but I showed that with hard work, we can get a good result.”
After the Ruta, Rodriguez will take a bit of a break, before heading to the Volta a Catalunya, la Itzulia and perhaps the Ardennes.
