The Tadej Pogacar Show on Repeat.
The next World Tour stage race of the year gets going on Monday, March 18th. The Volta is one of the oldest races in the world and usually a really good one. Last year R&R had an epic duel with the Slovenian taking a narrow victory partially due to some tactical brilliance. This year, the race will be different.
With just one member of the Big Four GC riders in the field, and it being the very greedy Pogi, coupled with a tough parcours, this one won’t be close.
Let’s run through each stage before the contenders and some predictions.
Stage One (173.9km): This is the usual opening stage with some shallow climbs and 2,677 altitude meters, but until recently it has just been an uphill sprint with a huge peloton. Nowadays, the top GC riders are such good puncheurs that Roglic and Remco went 1-2 on this stage last year. This one is Pogacar’s for the taking if he wants it. I think he does, and will have UAE pace some of the hills before the finish hard to put the sprinters in some difficulty or drop them altogether before Pogi does 30 seconds at 900 watts up the final hill and blasts everybody.
Stage Two (186.5km): An early mountaintop finish that will have major ramifications for the final General Classification. The stage finishes atop Valter 2000 (which, shockingly, is at 2,146 meters above sea level… maybe they should rename the mountain). Anyway after a warm up ramp of 9.6k/5.2 percent, the finishing mountain is 11.4k at 7.5 percent. That’s a bit longer and steeper than Pogi might be conventionally suited to, and if Jonas was here I might be a bit worried, but against this field, he’ll be heavily favored to clean this one up by a large margin. And I think he’ll want to put this race to bed early and will go full-gas on Valter to distance his rivals by as much as possible.
Stage Three (176.7km): Three mountains and nearly 4,000 total elevation meters with an HC finish will make for a brutal day in the saddle. The first climb has a 4k/9% ramp to finish, the second is a stepped 25k/4% slog, and the final one is 18.7km at 6.7 percent up to nearly 2,000 meters elevation. Basically every stage will be Pogi’s for the taking if he wants to work his team hard enough to control the breakaway, but this one I feel like maybe he’ll let slip away. YEAH RIGHT. With a sprint stage to follow, the New Cannibal will win this one too and solidify his GC dominance.
Stage Four (169.2km) A sprint stage to give the climbers a break. There aren’t many sprinters here, so a third-tier dude will get himself a World Tour win. I see Ethan Hayter, Bryan Coquard and possibly Marijn van den Berg as the only serious sprinters in the race.
Stage Five (167.3km): This one is interesting with hills most of the day culminating in a 6.4k/5.9% climb that crests 30k from the finish. That could throw a wrench into the plans of the sprint teams as after the descent there is only 15k of flat to the line. I think the sprinters can get over this one without a ferocious pace, it’ll be another duel between the guys mentioned above.
Stage Six (154.7km): It’s another multiple mountain test with over 4,000 meters of climbing and a 6k/7.2 percent finish. That’s obviously going to be a good climb for Pogacar, and with a bit of a shorter stage I expect UAE will control it all day and he’ll take another W.
Stage Seven (145.3km): The traditional Barcelona finishing circuit is usually one the most exciting final stages of the year. They do six laps of a course with a fake news 2.5k/4.8 percent climb but the final .8k is almost 11 percent. That’s certainly quite difficult, but it’s kind of hard to control. I think Pogi will let the breakaway take this one. I’ll go for Maxim van Gils to get it.
GC contenders:
Tadej Pogacar, Joao Almeida, Simon Yates, Sepp Kuss, Aleksandr Vlasov, Mikel Landa, Cian U, Maxim van Gils, Egan Bernal
Actually, in reviewing the list, there is a really stacked climbing line-up here. But I see the battle being for the podium rather than victory with an in-form and ruthless Pogi in the field and possibly Almeida at his disposal (these two do not usually race together, and Almeida is notoriously not a great teammate, so we’ll see how that goes.) But UAE also brings Felix Grosschartner, Pavel Sivakov, and Jay Vine, so they have plenty of climbing firepower to strangle the field.
It’s really difficult to predict what the order of the top ten will be. I won’t try to go that deep, but I’ll take a crack at the podium, as usual.
1). Tadej Pogacar 2). Sepp Kuss 3). Aleksandr Vlasov
I think Almeida will struggle early and go into domestique duty. Normally, Yates would be an obvious pick for the podium, but he hasn’t really impressed me this year. Bernal isn’t there yet, Landa normally does well here, but he hasn’t been great thus far. Kuss hasn’t looked amazing this year either, but I trust he’s building his form in what is essentially a home race for the American, and it’s a good route for him. Vlasov has been super this year and he may actually finish second. Cian might snag a top five. Van Gils probably isn’t ready for a GC challenge against a field of this caliber.
There are other good riders in the field, like 2018 TDF winner Geraint Thomas, but he never does well in the early-season races, and he might be washed at 37 years old. I don’t expect much from him.
Despite the high probability of four or five Pogi rampages and a huge margin of victory in the final GC, this should be an excellent race on an awesome parcours.
All route information and startlist courtesy of ProCyclingStats.com.
Jamie
Puncheur 
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