Tadej Pogacar’s crash leaves the most open grand tour in years – here are the four riders who could win the Vuelta

As Tadej Pogacar gingerly stepped into the waiting ambulance, a funereal hush descended on the peloton. His teammmates rolled forlornly over the finish line together like soldiers mourning a fallen commander; new race leader Enric Mas refused to don the red jersey out of respect for the patron.

But cycling waits for no-one and by the next day the general classification battle ignited in earnest. Stage nine’s full-throttle racing between the top names set the tone for how this Vuelta a Espana will play out, with four men poised to capitalise on Pogacar’s untimely exit.

Pogacar’s crash made a mockery of the many, many confident declarations of his victory (including this writer’s), so predicting who will now win the most open grand tour in years feels something of a fool’s errand. But here goes: barring a miraculous late comeback from someone further down the standings, one of Mas, Primoz Roglic, Felix Gall or Oscar Onley will be wearing red in two weeks’ time. (It goes without saying that that is depending on all of them avoiding Pogacar’s misfortune, too.)

As of the first rest day Mas sits 1’18” ahead of four-time champion Roglic, with Gall a further 21 seconds back. In provisional fourth sits Britain’s Onley, 2’20” behind Mas and 41 seconds behind Gall.

Of the quartet, Roglic is the only one with the experience of winning a grand tour; having won in Spain a record-equalling four times, he is at home here and his guile and race-craft will be a huge advantage. In the Slovenian’s ‘cons’ column: he is 36, five years older than Mas, and certainly not in peak Rogla form.

Mas is in unknown territory; this is the first time he has ever worn the leader’s jersey at a grand tour. As a Spaniard riding for a Spanish team, and having just secured Movistar’s first stage win at the Vuelta in five years, the pressure on his shoulders is huge. With three previous second-placed finishes on his palmares, he wants this the most – but with that comes the danger of taking too much risk to achieve it.

He played his cards brilliantly on stage nine, powering away with Onley for company in the last 3km and holding off the Scot for victory. “Now I understand Tadej – the jersey gives you wings,” the 31-year-old said afterwards. “This morning I was as excited as a little boy.” He will have to keep that excitement in check in order to change the narrative surrounding him; Mas is a perennial top-10 finisher at grand tours but has always cracked at some point.

Onley may be the biggest unknown: at 23 he is comparatively inexperienced, with this just his third grand tour and first as Netcompany-Ineos’ leader. He rode an astonishingly mature race to finish fourth at the Tour de France last year, playing a patient game, and has picked and chosen his moments so far this Vuelta, sticking with Mas on stage nine but unable to overhaul him in the sprint. He was fourth on stage four despite having been, in his words, “up all night on the toilet”; now he seems to have recovered from that complaint he is hugely dangerous on the toughest terrain.

Gall has the strongest team in the race on paper and is an excellent climber in incredible form. His Decathlon CMA CGM squad showed the most willingness to take the fight to Pogacar and are likely to try to control the majority of this race – albeit with many eyebrows raised at their strategy and propensity to burn their matches, seemingly with no gain. Lidl-Trek’s assistant sports director Maxime Monfort rather summed it up after stage eight: “Decathlon… sometimes they do some strange things.”

With no outfit as strong as UAE Team Emirates XRG, this race is going to be difficult to control in the model we have become used to since the ‘Sky train’ years, leaving the destiny of the red jersey to be decided most likely on moments of individual brilliance or collapse. There is plenty of road left for both. The first challenge is how the riders will manage the blistering heat of Andalusia, with even Pogacar caught out without adequate fuel late on stage six, in slightly more temperate climes.

There are four major summit finishes to come: stage 12 will take the riders 2,000m above sea level, another challenge to go with the punishing gradients; stage 14 is another mountainous test before three back-to-back stages to decide the race.

Stage 18’s individual time trial will have been circled by each of the main four; Mas and Gall will need to take time out of Roglic on every summit finish to compensate for how comprehensively the Slovenian will beat them against the clock. That’s followed by two more gruelling, long mountain stages, with stage 20 taking in three category-one climbs. Stage 21’s inaugural summit of the hors-categorie Collado del Alguacil could rip up the GC entirely, in the manner of Simon Yates’ long-range assault on the penultimate stage of the 2024 Giro.

As ever this is a climber’s Vuelta, but the TT will be hugely significant too. What may yet prove most significant of all is the psychological challenge that grand tour racing presents.

All four of these riders have a wholly unexpected chance to win the Vuelta, chances that looked more microscopic with every attack Pogacar put in. For Gall, Mas and Onley, success would make their careers; for Roglic, it would provide the sweetest of endings. Pogacar’s absence has blown the entire race up. Now it is a case of who can hold their nerve.