After working for Primož Roglič in the 2024 Tour, then crashing out of the 2025 Giro d'Italia in the first week, it'd be fair to say that Australia's Jai Hindley has recently built up a fair amount of unfinished business with the Grand Tours - and at the 2025 Vuelta a España, the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe racer is keen to put the record straight with a vengeance.
Plenty of top riders taking part in the Vuelta a España this year and with potential to do a good GC have already been ruling themselves out or playing the wait-and-see game until the first major mountain top finish in Andorra next Thursday.
Hindley, however, makes no secret that he is keen to go for a top GC placing, and while the last two years have done anything but smile on the man from Perth, West Australia in the Grand Tours, he hopes the Vuelta will be a very different story.
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Hindley was last seen in a Grand Tour on the side of a rainslicked road towards Naples in the Giro's first week. But the Giro was also where he won outright in 2022 and finished second in 2020, and together with a stage win and spell in yellow in the 2023 Tour de France, prior to crashes making getting to Paris [in seventh] a survival exercise, and Hindley could yet come back from Spain with a top GC result as well.
"For me, it's clear that the GC is the big ambition of the race and I'm going for that," Hindley told Cyclingnews at the stage 1 start. "It'll be a big fight over three weeks, but I think it's a pretty open race, I'd say."
"Jonas [Vingegaard] is the big favourite of course, and then there are the two guys from UAE [João Almeida and Juan Ayuso].
"But if you look at the Vuelta it's always aggressive, and anyway I'm really up for it, I'm really keen. I've been looking forward to the Vuelta since I crashed out of the Giro."
Hindley has known his fair share of bad falls in his time, but the fall in the 2025 Giro when the peloton was going at full tilt on perilously greasy roads, was one he now describes as "very solid."
"I had a small concussion, also a fractured L3 vertebrae, also a small fracture of the scaphoid, so it wasn't the nicest," he said, "But I was also quite lucky given the heaviness of the crash and that it was at a really high speed."
"In the end I had two weeks off which was also quite fast [for recovery], and I was well supported by the team, they gave me time to recover properly."
His road back to racing included a week-long spell at the Red Bull Centre in Salzburg "to kick start and get on top of the rehab and that was a massive start in my opinion."
"Then once I recovered, I went to altitude at Livigno and rode the Tour of Burgos." The August heat in northern Spain was not ideal, he said, but overall "it's all good."
Hindley has a quietly respectable track record in Spain's Grand Tour, too, claiming seventh in the Vuelta in 2022, the year he won the Giro, as well as finishing it back in the day in 2018 as his first Grand Tour, when he was still with Sunweb.
This time round he'll be sharing the leadership role with up-and-coming Italian Giulio Pellizzari, although the Italian will be playing a 'free electron' role and focussing fully on stage wins, while Hindley goes for GC.
Pellizzari's remarkable Giro d'Italia debut, though, taking fourth, is still in the minds of many fans, particularly given the 2025 Vuelta's start and opening stages on his homesoil in Italy. And it's impossible not to remember that by January 1 next year, too, the already considerable GC roster of Red Bull will be further boosted by the arrival of Remco Evenepoel.
Hindley has yet to see how Evenepoel's presence will further affect the ambitions of riders like himself, Roglič, 2025 Tour de France podium finisher Florian Lipowitz and 2024 Giro d'Italia runner up Dani Martínez. But he has no doubt that the presence of the Belgian represents a pivotal moment for the squad in GC battles.
"We already had quite a lot of guys already for the general classification, but the addition of Remco is really massive for the team," Hindley tells Cyclingnews.
"It means we can take big steps, he's a phenomenal rider, a phenomenal talent, a young guy, and a huge addition. It's exciting times for the team."
How this could affect his own GC ambitions is something that from the outside at least is impossible to ignore, but Hindley says that rather than this upping the ante inside the squad, he's got his own high expectations to fulfill.
"It's not so much from the team, but I do have my own self-expectations," he says.
"I haven't ridden the best Grand Tours in the last couple of years, so I really keen to have a good one here, and really show myself. I want to be at the pointy end of things again."
Red Bull certainly know how to win the Vuelta a España, given they managed to succeed with Roglič last year as he took his record--equalling fourth edition of the race, so Hindley will be able to count on some considerable experience from the team car.
Quite how closely he'll be able to follow Roglič's wheel tracks in terms of results is hard to say, but the Australian is certainly determined to give it his best shot.
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