Marc Soler (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) soared to a solo victory on an explosive opening day of the Vuelta a Murcia.
High winds in southeastern Spain forced the stage to be shortened by half, and then blew it to pieces in the less than two hours of racing that remained.
Tom Pidcock (Pinarello Q36.5) gave chase on the climb from a ‘peloton’ that had been decimated to just a dozen riders, but Soler had started it with over a minute in hand – too much even for Pidcock’s skills on the steep descent towards the finish.
"It was fantastic teamwork," said Soler, and it's worth noting that UAE Team Emirates-XRG posted four riders in the top seven.
The last of them was Tim Wellens, but the Belgian champion's ride was arguably the key to the whole display. When the peloton split in the crosswinds with 60km to go, Wellens forced an 18-man split that included Pidcock before attacking it and bridging to the Soler break alone.
As his two teammates shouldered the work on his behalf, Wellens toyed with the rest of the break, letting the wheel go to open gaps and pressure the others. When those games were played on a particularly exposed stretch of road 40km from home, Soler and Johansen clipped off and were never seen again.
That means Soler pulls on the leader's jersey ahead of Saturday's final stage. He has a lead of 19 seconds over teammate Johansen in the general classification. Pidcock is third at 40 seconds, looking in great form on his season debut, but with a huge amount of ground to make up tomorrow.
How it unfolded
The Vuelta a Murcia’s return to a stage race format after five years as a one-day event was marred by the high winds that forced the route to be significantly altered.
After discussions between race organisers and the CPA riders’ union, represented by Bahrain Victorious’ Pello Bilbao, it was decided that the opening half of the course along the coast from the planned start town of Cartagena was too dangerous.
With the start moved inland to Fortuna, a shade over 83km remained, but the finish up and over the Alto Virgen del Castillo remained.
With such a short route and with the wind still buffeting across the exposed arid inland plains, it was a breathless race.
The breakaway formed early on a long drag uphill, with Soler and Johansen joined by Quinten Hermans (Pinarello Q36.5), Hector Alvarez (Spain), Kamil Gradek (Bahrain-Victorious), Luca Paletti (Bardiani-CSF 7 Saber) and the Movistar trio of Jefferson Cepeda, Juan Pedro Lopez, and Raul Garcia Pierna.
They opened a 30-second gap before all hell broke loose in the peloton, and echelons started to form in the crosswinds. Wellens was on the front foot, and Pidcock seemed in a great position with three teammates in what turned into a front split of 18.
However, hesitation in the group gave Wellens a chance to spring clear, though he did require a mightily impressive effort to bridge across to the leaders. Straight away, his teammates hit the front, driving what was now a 10-man break clear of a peloton that soon reformed.
The gap rose to one minute by the 40km-to-go mark, where the critical split in the break formed. Wellens had already been leaving gaps to put pressure on the others, notably Movistar, and in a particularly exposed crosswind section Soler and Johansen found themselves with a gap and simply rode on. Lopez and Paletti were immediately dispatched while the others never managed to come together in a concerted chase.
As such, they started to drift back towards a peloton that was motoring along and, having fragmented in that same stretch of exposed road, continued to decrease in number. By the time the Wellens group was back in the bunch with 17km to go, the group was down to a mere 25 riders. Bahrain Victorious continued to hammer it on the front, reducing it yet further ahead of the late climb, but they were unable to put much of a dent into the leading UAE pair, who headed uphill with over a minute in hand.
Soler quickly eased clear of his companion up through the steep and narrow slopes of the old town, and victory was effectively in the bag once he’d safely negotiated the tricky little descent. Pidcock made a big move from the main group behind and climbed impressively, but the stage win had already sailed by.
His 40-second deficit is a lot on a final day that’s only moderately hilly, but the wind is forecast to blow once again in Murcia on Saturday, so we could be in for another thriller.
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