'We could not stay on the bikes' - with riders blown off course, a 15-minute 'race' and a full winners' final ceremony, here's how Vuelta a Murcia's windblasted stage-that-wasn't veered into something far odder

If anybody had tuned into the TV coverage of stage 2 of the 2026 Vuelta a Murcia after the race had ended, they might well have thought it was business as usual.

After all, there was Marc Soler (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), the race leader, receiving his yellow jersey as outright winner on the final winner's podium, followed by the respective champions of all the different classifications as well as the top three overall - Soler, his teammate Julius Johansen and Pinarello-Q36.5's Tom Pidcock all posing for the usual photos.

Except, in fact, the usual winners' ceremony in the small town of Santomera was the conclusion of one of what developed into arguably the most memorable odd early-season stage races of recent years.

The first change happened early on Saturday morning, and after an opening stage which had taken in difficult conditions, being shortened because of high winds, organisers, riders and officials had initially agreed to start stage 2 but reduce its length by 45 kilometres. The big two climbs of the key day of the race, the Collado Bermejo and Cresta del Gallo, remained on the program.

So stage 2 duly started and ran for over 20 kilometres, only for winds to prove to be so strong that multiple riders were blown off course on one exposed corner.

The exact number of fallers remains far from clear, although one top name said it was 20, and others even more. At least initially, and despite the spectacular nature of some images posted on social media, no riders were reported injured.

After a lengthy discussion with organisers and officials, Plan B swung into operation. This was that the peloton got back on their team buses and were driven for around 45 minutes to the finish town of Santomera, where they put on a 10-kilometre exhibition ride.

After their leisurely quarter-of-an-hour saunter round the backroads of the town in blustery, but fortunately dry conditions, the peloton - mostly smiling by this point, although those caught up by the wind must still have been feeling a shade jittery - reached the finish line in dribs and drabs, and then headed for the buses again.

Meanwhile, those due to receive prizes went to the finishing podium, and with the MC thanking everybody for making a colossal effort during the ceremony, the winners received their awards to polite applause from local fans and spectators.

If the ceremony was a normal one, the background to the stage had been anything but straightforward. Warnings had been in place since the day before for an 'orange alert' for severe weather in parts of SE Spain, causing a nearby race, the 2.HC women's elite Setmana Valenciana, to cancel their stage on the same day. Murcia, however, had opted to go ahead, only for things to go wrong.

"We can't do anything against a howling gale," race official Paco Guzman insisted to Eurosport mid-way through the day. "We could save stage 1, but today there have been gusts of up to 90kmh."

"Rather than rider safety being at risk, we decided to stop the race and head to the finish for the final short ride. There will be a stage 'winner' and the podium, and that'll be the end of this year's race."

After naming climate change as one of the factors responsible, Guzman explained that initially the plan had been to do the whole stage, but it had not worked out.

"We'd reached an agreement with the riders, sports directors and the commissaires to do almost all the stage because initially it looked like we could do it and we reached that agreement between all of us, we took a risk and things went wrong," he told Eurosport.

"There were some really strong gusts, when the race turned right it [the wind] took lots of riders off course to the left. So to minimize the damage, we had to neutralize it," another official told CyclingProNet.

She added that the descent of the Collado Bermejo would have been impossible, due to the number of tree branches on the road.

" The most important thing at the end of the day is the riders' security, there was a small crash," Guzman added - this comment is not clear whether he referred to the mass fall sparked by the wind or another completely separate incident - "and that was the turning point. The race was cancelled."

Riders in the main seemed accepting of the changes, although at least one argued that the switches of plan could have made earlier.

"We tried to start the race, the start was quite ok but after it was too windy, we could not stay on the bikes, so they neutralized the race and we just did the one lap here," Pinarello-Q36.5's Emils Liepinš told Eurosport later on.

"There were always doubts in the start, do we or don't we," race leader and outright Marc Soler concluded to the same broadcaster.

"There was an 'orange alert', we tried it, and then a lot of gusts of wind, some riders blown off course, so it was not entirely safe."

Multiple races had been cancelled or changed this spring, Soler said later on and paid short shrift to the idea that the stage could have gone over the Collado, the big climb of the day.

"It's always easy to talk when you're not affected and you're not one of the riders who went off course," he said.

Asked about how the situation had been handled by the peloton, Liepins reported that "The riders were saying the organisation needs to make a plan before because they knew already it would be super-windy. So they needed to make a Plan B, to know, not like one hour before they start to think what we do."

Following the Murcia stage-2-that-wasn't, the men's peloton will continue in southern Spain and Portugal for some time, with the Clásica de Alméria followed by the Clásica de Jaén on Monday and the Vuelta a Andalucia and Volta ao Algarve running concurrently from Wednesday onwards. Fortunately, the weather is set to improve.