Vuelta a España hits the high mountains one last time - Stage 18 preview

Stage 18: Pola de Allande to La Cruz de Linares

Date: September 14

Distance: 179km

Stage type: Mountain

The 2023 Vuelta a España rounds off its high mountain stages on Thursday with its ninth and final summit finish, a double ascent of the ultra-steep Puerto de la Cruz de Linares.

Ranked category 1, the Puerto de la Cruz de Linares has all of the typical characteristics of a climb in the northerly region of Asturias. In other words, it's narrow, twisting and poorly surfaced, including one section that switches from rough tarmac to even rougher cement. 

Then once the riders reach the summit for the first time, they will instantly face a brutally-technical descent to stretch their concentration even further.

As for Jumbo-Visma, if they come through a stage as hard as this one with their current stranglehold on the GC intact with race leader Sepp Kuss, Jonas Vingegaard in second and Primož Roglič in third, their odds of final success in Madrid will have risen considerably. Coming so close to the end of the Vuelta, though, Puerto de la Cruz de Linares is no easy challenge for anyone, no matter how strongly they've performed up to now.

On a stage containing 4,100 metres of vertical climbing, the final double-ascent of Puerto de la Cruz de Linares constitutes just one of several categorized challenges. Mid-way through the stage, the category 1 Puerto de San Lorenzo, often tackled en route to the Angliru, may be much more familiar to most riders, but that doesn’t make its 9.9 kilometres at 8.6% any easier.

Lurking between the San Lorenzo and the Cruz de Linares climbs, too, is a short but punishing third category climb, the Alto del Tenebredo. Just three kilometres long but very steep in places, Tenebredo could act as a springboard for the first attacks in the finale of the stage. 

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As for the 8.3km-long Puerto de la Cruz de Linares, itself  “as far as the village of Castañedo del Monte [km5] there’s practically no breaks in the climbing at all,” Pelayo Sánchez (Burgos-BH), one of the handful of riders from the region, recently told AS newspaper.

“It has some very hard slopes with gradients between 8% and 14% percent. And once you get through Castañedo and after a really hard cement ramp where there’s that steepest segment of the whole climb, at 16%, the landscape changes completely and it makes for a very different challenge.

"The last part of the climb comes out of woodland, and runs across really open terrain. The road ramps up and drops down a lot prior to a final hard drag up to the finish.

“That double climb of Linares will provide a lot of scope for battle, because we could well end up with two fights going on, one for the stage and the other for the GC,” Sánchez told AS. 

“The second time round, positioning will be very important, because the road narrows a lot when the climbs starts and if you're not well-placed you can pay for that on the rest of the climb.

“It’s going to be a hard day, a lot of high mountains and five  classified climbs in total. If the favourites and their teams push it hard on the first time round the Cruz de Linares, that’d really limit the options for the break. The descent is a technical one, too, and on finales like this, that makes the drop off the climb as important as the final climb itself.”

The other big unknown factor is the weather. Current predictions are for the day to stay sunny, but in the verdant mountains of Asturias, rain is almost always a possibility as well, and wetter conditions would render already rough road surfaces far more difficult.