Sometimes, the cards won't fall your way no matter what. And whenever Jayco-AlUla climber Eddie Dunbar weighs up his chances of success in the last mountain stage of the Vuelta a España on Saturday, the Irishman can't help believing the odds of repeating 2024's spectacular last-minute victory at Picón Blanco are severely limited.
Rewind 12 months, and Dunbar had already broken a longstanding drought on top-level success with his first Grand Tour stage win in the second week of the Vuelta. But if his win from a break in Padron in Galicia had much of opportunism in his lengthy last-kilometre sprint for the line on a hilly stage, his victory at Picón Blanco ten days later was a much more textbook high mountains lone charge away from the main pack of GC contenders.
The key difference with 2025 is that at Picón Blanco last year, the 29-year-old points out to Cyclingnews, the overall classification was virtually settled. On this occasion, and despite the early climbs on the stage favouring a mountain specialist like Dunbar when it comes to getting in the break, Dunbar believes the narrow gap between the top GC favourites will render it much harder for any long-distance moves to go the distance.
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"I don't think the break is going to stay away to be honest, it's a tough stage and the GC is pretty close, and there are bonus seconds which might make a difference," Dunbar told Cyclingnews. "There will be a break, of course, but I'll be very surprised if it makes it to the finish."
Neither race leader Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) nor his closest pursuer, João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) is in top climbing form. However, as Dunbar sees it, the opportunity to round off the Vuelta with a stage win is too good for them to want to miss.
"One of them will want to win the stage for sure. Red Bull-Bora, too, have shown [on stage 17 to Alto de El Morredero] they are on the way up with two guys on GC as well, so maybe they'll want to win a stage as well.
"Then you have [Tom] Pidcock (Q36.5) in there too, who hasn't won a stage yet, and for sure he's been building to win one. So I don't think any of them are going to throw away that chance."
On the plus side, personally, Dunbar says, he has managed to reset and re-mentalize himself after his bad crash at the Tour in the first week forced him to abandon, and that was despite getting sick and not being able to train properly after the Tour of Norway. His next target, forming part of the Irish team for the upcoming UCI Road World Championships to support Ben Healy, remains more than on track.
"I'm definitely coming out of the eulta in better condition than I came in anyway," Dunbar says. "I haven't hit the heights of last year's race, I think that was obvious. Also, I have not had the condition I had at the start of the Tour, which was a bit disappointing, but again that's out of my control."
" I came here, the team sent me here, we rolled the dice and hoped I'd come round. I've kind of had glimpses of it, but I'm not really yet at my level."
Next up will be the World Championships road race, where Dunbar hopes to benefit from the hard haul he's had in the Vuelta to raise his game, and where the Irish team's goal is "to have numbers in the final."
"Obviously, we'll be working for someone like Ben [Healy], who's a leader of EF in one-day races, and he's one of the favourites for this one, too," Dunbar said. "And if he wants to make the race hard, you have to be there to support him for that, and that's my next goal."
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