Roche is getting it hard the past couple of days, but he’s still in the Vuelta top ten
Nicolas Roche has expressed his disappointment at losing contact with the select group so early on the gruelling final climb of yesterday’s stage 16 of the Vuelta.
The Irishman said he was going as slowly as just 7kph on the really steep stretch just before the finish of the Cuitu Negro, which reached 25 per cent gradient in some places.
Writing in his Irish Independent Vuelta diary today, Tuesday, Roche said he was in trouble on the penultimate climb of the day and had gone over the top of it last man in the large group chasing the breakaway.
“This was the first warning that I was going to be fighting to survive today rather than get a top placing on the stage,” he writes.
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Of the final 19.5km climb up to the finish, he said his group containing the favourites hurtled onto the lower slopes with half of the peloton already dropped with 16km remaining, adding that he was “in the hurt box” already.
He blew just 4kms later, slipping off the back of the group. He then found himself in a smaller group with 5th placed rider overall Daniel Moreno (Katusha) and his team mate Denis Menchov. The latter drilled it hard on the front of the group as the climb evened off, towing Moreno back to the group of main favourites, with Roche tucked in behind them.
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However, with that effort to get back on requiring Roche to go back onto the big ring and sprint in the line to hold Menchov, by the time he got back to the favourites he was paying for his efforts and in trouble again almost immediately.
“After 2km of chasing we got back on but I only managed about a kilometre with the favourites before they accelerated and I blew again. All I could do was swing out into the middle of the road and do my own thing, raging that I was the only one in the group of about 16 riders that blew up and I would have to ride the final 8km alone.”
Roche would eventually limit his losses pretty well on what was perhaps one of the toughest climbs a Grand Tour has faced and which certainly served up one of the slowest ever finishes, with the finish line situated on a stretch of road with a 25 per cent gradient.
The Irishman lost 6:58 to Dario Cataldo, with the Omega Pharma-Quick Step riding holding on from the day’s early breakaway for a terrific win.
However, it was the time relinquished to his GC rivals in the group he was dropped from that was more important for Roche.
Those losses ranged between one and two minutes to the key rivals scattered across the climb just ahead of him and saw Roche drop from 9th to 10th on GC. With 11th placed Tomasz Marczynski (Vacansoleil) having climbed well and put a couple of minutes into Roche in the past two stages, he will fancy his chances of relieving Roche of that 10th place in the next couple of days.
Said Roche: “I’m really hoping I can recover a bit on (today’s) rest day and will feel a bit better on Wednesday. I’m going to have to really dig in and hang on. I want a top 10 and will be really pissed off if I have to settle for 11th at the Vuelta and 12th on the Tour.”
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