RABO BLOG: JUAN MANUEL GARATE ON THE VUELTA SO FAR

“There are some majorly difficult climbs coming up, starting with the Aitana mountain-top finish on Sunday.”

Riding his Giant TCR Advanced SL bicycle, Rabobank rider Juan Manuel Garate won the most difficult stage in the 2009 Tour de France: Stage 20—the mountain-top finish on Mont Ventoux. It’s a legendary, brutal climb and winning the stage puts the former Spanish national champion in the record books alongside names like Eddy Merckx, Raymond Poulidor, and Charly Gaul. Garate is now part of the Rabobank team competing in the Vuelta a España which is back on home soil, after the first four stages took place in the Netherlands and Belgium. Following Stage 6, Garate took some time to blog about the season’s third Grand Tour:

“So here we are back in Spain. It’s hot, it’s sunny and the riders in the bunch are gradually adapting to the idea that we really are in the Tour of Spain after all that time in northern Europe. Most of the Spanish riders in the bunch, I have to say, are quite pleased to be here, and not because they were homesick. A lot of them aren’t familiar with the Classics and aren’t at all used to racing in the flat, windy, cold kind of conditions that you get so often in the Netherlands, and they didn’t like that one bit. So they were pleased when the plane touched down in Spain.”

“After two days we’re slowly getting used to the heat again, too. But it’s been a pretty brutal change of temperature, to say the least. It’s about 20 degrees warmer than it was in Holland and Belgium, and so you suffer a lot, particularly on days like today [Stage 6] when there’s only a tailwind so there’s no real breeze inside the bunch.”

“As for me, I’m slowly getting better. It’ll be five weeks to the day on Saturday since I fell and badly hurt my arm in the Clasica San Sebastian, and I’m still slowly recovering. I’m a little bit off my top condition because I couldn’t train as well as I’d have liked because of the injury. In fact I ended up only starting 10 days before the Vuelta began. I didn’t crash in Holland or Belgium; that big crash in Liege on Stage 4 didn’t affect me because I was right at the back of the bunch. I was still pretty nervous about my hand, to be honest, and couldn’t really take it off the bars, so I stayed as far back as possible hoping I’d stay out of trouble. Now I’m slowly coming into shape again, but it’ll take time. I certainly won’t be up there on the race’s first summit finish on Sunday on the Aitana.”

“In any case, tomorrow [Saturday] is the first long time trial of the race. Personally I don’t think there’ll be too many big differences. It’s too early, even if some climbers could lose a lot of time because it’s so flat and exposed. Afterwards there are some majorly difficult climbs coming up, starting with the Aitana mountain-top finish on Sunday. It’s not particularly steep; it only goes up to about nine percent at the worst after a sharp right-hand bend when you go up towards the military base close towards the top with about four kilometers to go. But it is a really long climb, over 20 kilometers, and after 200 kilometers of racing up and down hill all day, it’s going to be very tough. That’s going to be the first real test of the Vuelta.”