Ruta del Sol: Fuglsang wins opening stage

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Defending Vuelta a Andalucia champion Jakob Fuglsang (Astana Pro Team) and Mikel Landa (Bahrain McLaren) have delivered a dramatic near-knock-out blow to their rivals in the first stage of the race, with Fuglsang in pole position after claiming the day's win. 

After a 2019 to forget for Landa and his best season ever for Fuglsang, in their 2020 debut, the Basque and Dane joined forces on stage 1's final main climb of the day, the Puerto de las Palomas, deep in the rugged sierras of western Andalucia.

Having carved open a lead of around 30 seconds on the Palomas, the two held their advantage on the fast, technical descent, before Fuglsang had no problems blasting away from Landa on the last segment of the short, punchy rise to the finish through the mountain town of Grazalema.

The peloton crumbled completely under the joint attack by Fuglsang and Landa, with Jack Haig (Mitchelton-Scott) the first rival home, in fourth place at 27 seconds, just behind Landa's Bahrain McLaren teammate, Dylan Teuns. Other top names and teams fared considerably worse in a stage race where the final differences tend to measured in seconds, from UAE Team Emirates leader David de la Cruz, who ceded more than a minute, to Movistar's former Paris-Nice winner, Marc Soler, who ended up 1:21 down, and his teammate Enric Más, who finished even further adrift. 

If, for some, this year's GC battle at the Vuelta a Andalucia is thus over almost before it's begun, it was largely thanks to the always unpredictable Landa, who launched a steady, searing attack half-way up the main climb of the day – the first-category Puerto de las Palomas.

Only Fuglsang was able to get across to the Basque, who was racing his first event for new team Bahrain McLaren following two rollercoaster years at Movistar. The two headed away from the rest of the field, working smoothly together on the unforgiving seven per cent gradients of the upper half of the Palomas. 

Mitchelton-Scott put in the strongest defence behind, as Andrey Zeits took off alone in hot pursuit of the duo. But Zeits then visibly eased up to work for team leader Haig in the strung-out peloton of some half-dozen chasers, but as Bahrain McLaren had both Teuns and Pello Bilbao acting as watchdogs for Landa up ahead, and Astana were represented by Ion Izagirre, it was no easy task.

Mitchelton-Scott's pursuit, though, was a question of limiting the damage when faced with Landa and Fuglsang's powerful joint assault. Although Landa had been complaining about nagging back injuries even before stage 1 of the race – after he was struck by a car during training a few weeks back – he seemed to have no difficulty in setting a pace with Fuglsang that proved devastating for the shrinking group of chasers some 30 seconds back.

As soon as the descent off the Puerto de las Palomas down into Grazalema was completed – not without one scarily uncambered left-hand bend just before the village – the two had an 800-metre cobbled rise up to the finish to complete the course.

Gambling on who would win would have been risky: back in 2018 on a similarly difficult cobbled, uphill finish on Andalucia's stage 4 to Alcala de los Gazules – on the other side of the same mountain range as Grazalema – Landa had finished second behind final overall winner Tim Wellens (Lotto Soudal), but a good seven seconds ahead of Fuglsang. But in 2019, on the same treacherously difficult uphill finish in Alcala de los Gazalues, Fuglsang had claimed the runner-up spot behind Wellens.

This time around, the Dane was in complete control of his rival, breaking Landa's rhythm by braking slightly half-way up, keeping close to the barriers so that the Basque could only come past on one side, then accelerating away out of the last, left-hand bend within sight of the finishing gantries. 

Landa had already given up well before Fuglsang had pounded across the line with a roar of delight, but the Basque's second place nonetheless puts him in the driver's seat for trying to prevent the Dane from taking his second-straight Andalucia title.

Thursday's stage 2 will offer something of a truce on the already unleashed GC battle. Assuming there are no crosswinds as the peloton speeds across the flatlands of central Andalucia, and no ambushes on the last third-category climb some 12 kilometres from the finish, the most likely outcome is a reduced-bunch sprint on a grinding uphill through the streets of Iznajar. After that, it's back into the mountains and, for now at least, Andalucia is Fuglsang and Landa's to lose.