Landslides force the Vuelta to redraw its decisive mountain stage two weeks before the start
February's flooding around Granada left a key climb impassable; the organisers have found a near-identical replacement.
A flood that hit Granada in February has just redrawn the decisive day of a Grand Tour that starts in a fortnight. Unipublic, which organises the Vuelta a España, said on Friday that landslides caused by serious flash flooding in the area have left the Alto de Hazallanas impassable — and Hazallanas was due to be climbed twice on stage 20, the last real chance anyone has to change the race.
The summit finish survives. Stage 20 still ends on the Collado del Alguacil, a first-category-plus climb never used in the race before. What changes is the approach: instead of two ascents of Hazallanas through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the riders will now tackle the Puerto de El Duque as the penultimate climb, another road the Vuelta has never used.
A near-identical replacement, deliberately
El Duque rises out of the same steep River Genil valley as the climb it replaces, and its final two kilometres are the same stretch of road, topping out at 1,670 metres where it meets the main route up to the Sierra Nevada ski station. It is not quite a like-for-like swap: El Duque averages 8.2% over roughly 4.8km, against 9.8% over 5.5km for Hazallanas, and it does not have the brutal 18% and 19% ramps that begin the older climb straight off a technical descent out of the village of Güéjar Sierra.
So the stage keeps its shape and loses a little of its bite — which, on the day that is supposed to settle the general classification, is not a trivial difference.
The part that travels beyond cycling
This is what event delivery looks like when your venue is public mountain road you neither own nor control. Six months after the water came through, the road is still gone, and the organiser's answer was not to cancel a stage but to find a substitute close enough in length, gradient and finishing kilometres that the racing it produces is broadly the racing that was designed. The useful skill here is not avoiding disruption — nobody can — but having somewhere to move it to, and knowing the terrain well enough to know what that somewhere is.
The Vuelta a España runs from 22 August to 13 September.
