Not so long ago the main cycling race Tour de France ended, and very soon, in less than two weeks on August 25, the last Grand Tour of the season the Spanish Vuelta will start. In this article, I will overview the most interesting elements of the race route.
The length of the Vuelta is 3255 kilometers, which are divided into 21 stages, including 6 flat, 6 hilly, 5 mountain stages and 2 individual time trial stages. As for the route itself, it is worth considering the following interesting points:
1. The Vuelta starts in Malaga, a city that has already hosted the stages of the Spanish Tour 30 times. The first stage is an eight-kilometer ITT race with a, which will take place directly through the streets of the city. Malaga itself is remarkable for us, the inhabitants of Scorum, by that it is the nearest big city near some kind of crypto-offshore - Gibraltar.
2. The first serious mountains awais riders already in the fourth stage of the race. Despite the fact that this stage is attributed by organizers to the category of “middle mountaim”, the riders have to overcome two peaks of the first category, finishing in the second of them.
3. The first week of the Spanish race ended with a real mountain stage with the passage of four category rises and finishing in the mountain of the highest category Alto de la Covatilla at the altitude of 1965 meters. Racers can show their best this time, not paying attention to the need to save energy, since after the ninth stage of the athletes will have the first day of rest.
4. The main for the general classification are likely to be the stages from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, the first three of them - the mountain, after the fifteenth stage there will be a second rest, and the sixteenth stage, the first in the third week, which is an individual race with the distane of 32 km. At the fifteenth stage of the riders wii go to the legendary Lagot de Cavadonga with extreme gradients reaching up to 20%.
5. The organizers of the Vuelta are known for their love to include into the route huge number of mountain stages, including last week. But this year last week is almost entirely flat, which is not very characteristic for the Spanish Grand Tour.
6. The only mountain stage in the last week will be the twentieth stage, which will lead the race to Andorra. The stage is remarkable because its length is less than 100 kilometers, and the number of category mountains is six. This stage looks like the experimental seventeenth stage of the Tour de France. It will be the last opportunity to compete for victory in the general classification.
7. The race finishes with the 100-kilometer stage of friendship with the finish in the Spanish capital Madrid.
8. On the Vuelta route this year there will be unusually many new cities that host the start and finishing of stages. In total, there will be 19 such cities, that is, almost half of all the points marked on the Vuelta route - 2018.
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