The riders will catch a glimpse of the Atlantic coast for the first time when they set off from\u00a0Poio, a town on the Ria de Pontevedra estuary, where they\u2019ll head towards a finish further\u00a0south in Mos, a place with some cycling pedigree as the birthplace of \u00d3scar Pereiro. While\u00a0Pereiro never finished higher than 17th at the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a, he was a much better\u00a0performer at the Tour de France, and is most famous for being one of that race\u2019s most\u00a0unlikely overall winners when he triumphed in the messy 2006 edition. On a strange, race-changing stage of the second week, he was deemed a benign enough threat to be given 30\u00a0minutes by the GC candidates, and the yellow jersey; a jersey which he defend expectations\u00a0by holding on to during the Alps, then ultimately won after the only man to eventually\u00a0overtake him on GC, Floyd Landis, was disqualified for doping.<\/p>\n
Pereiro\u2019s breakaway coup that day might be the ultimate example of a rider who benefited\u00a0from an uncontrolled break being allowed too much freedom by a complacent peloton, and\u00a0today\u2019s parcours is of a similar kind that requires the GC men to be attentive. While it\u2019s not a mountain stage, there is still enough climbing around the low summits of Galicia for the riders to accumulate 3,472m of elevation gain. And many of those climbs and these undulating roads were the same as used for the penultimate stage of the 2021 Vuelta, which caused a significant upheaval in the GC, with Miguel \u00c1ngel L\u00f3pez the casualty. Starting the day in third overall and on the brink of a podium finish, the Colombian was caught napping,\u00a0failing to follow a move made on a climb about 60km from the finish, and losing more and\u00a0more time as the stage progressed. He was so incensed that he quit the race altogether.<\/p>\n
While today\u2019s stage shares the same two final climbs as that day, the Alto de Prado (4.3km\u00a0at 8.9%) and finish at Castro de Herville (8.2km at 5.2%), the Alto de Groba (11.3km at\u00a05.4%) that precedes them is not quite as steep as that which L\u00f3pez lost ground. He did so\u00a0as a result of the pace set by Ineos Grenadiers on that climb, and it could be that no team\u00a0feels compelled to do something similar, especially considering that its summit comes 58km\u00a0from the finish. Nevertheless, even if nothing does happen before the climb to the finish, it\u2019s\u00a0still hard enough to force the GC contenders into a fight.<\/p>\n
![\"Vuelta](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Untitled_design_-_2025-08-28T130543.669_1024x1024.png\")
\nContenders<\/p>\n
Stage 16 is going to be a battle between opportunistic attackers who want to try their luck from the breakaway and the general classification riders who are looking to gain time overall. If the GC men decide that they want to battle it out for a stage win and keep the gap between them and the break small, then we could see an uphill sprint led home by current race leader Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike). Vingegaard will go to battle with the likes of Tom Pidcock (Q36.5 Pro Cycling) and Jo\u00e3o Almeida (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), who are his current closest challengers when it comes to the fight for the red jersey.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, as we have seen from their seven stage wins so far in this Vuelta, UAE Team Emirates do not sacrifice their chance of individual victories in the name of protecting Almeida’s GC campaign. This means that the likes of Jay Vine, Marc Soler and Juan Ayuso are likely to be given freedom from their team to go for the breakaway and try and win yet another stage on Tuesday. If they do so, it will contribute to a historic performance from the team at this Vuelta and bring them closer to breaking the record for the most number of wins from a team in a singular season.<\/p>\n
There will be plenty of riders hoping to spoil the UAE party, though. Santiago Buitrago has been active in breakaways so far for Bahrain-Victorious and has a couple of top-10 finishes on stages with similar parcours as stage 13. The same can be said for David Gaudu of Groupama-FDJ who won stage three of the Vuelta after proving his good form by outsprinting Mads Pedersen on an uphill finish. Andrea Bagioli is an option for Lidl-Trek on stage 13 considering the final climb is likely too difficult for Pedersen and Pablo Castrillo of Movistar is also a rider to watch when it comes to the breakaway.<\/p>\n
Other contenders for a breakaway victory are\u00a0Micha\u0142 Kwiatkowski of the Ineos Grenadiers and\u00a0Gijs Leemreize for Team Picnic PostNL.<\/p>\n
Prediction<\/p>\n
We’re expecting another UAE Team Emirates-XRG victory today and think that Jay Vine is going to add to his win tally in this race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Date: Tuesday 9 SeptemberDistance: 168kmStart location: PoioFinish location: MosStart time: 13:05 CESTFinish time: 17:17 CEST A peculiarity of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,85],"class_list":["post-131266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}