When the Vuelta a España peloton led by Visma-Lease a Bike curled its way round the sharp right-hand bend at the foot of the stage 7 final ascent to Cerler, it briefly looked as if top favourite Jonas Vingegaard‘s team would put down the kind of blistering climbing pace that usually precedes an all-out attack by the Dane.

Instead, after Vingegaard’s teammates Victor Campenaerts, Wilco Kelderman and finally Ben Turner had maintained a steady pace on the lower slopes of the 11-kilometre climb, rather than turn up the heat even higher on their rivals, the Dutch squad then opted to take things much more calmly.

Things even reached a point where UAE Team Emirates-XRG, realising that Vingegaard and company were not going flat-out, moved to the front with Marc Soler and João Almeida.

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An attack by Almeida then met with a rapid response by Vingegaard. But the Dane’s unwillingness to collaborate strongly and distance the rest of the field, suggested that rather than opting to blow the race apart, and perhaps retaking the red jersey from Torstein Træen (Bahrain Victorious) too soon, Vingegaard wanted to keep his powder dry for further down the line.

Without taking more decisive action, Vingegaard has in any case moved from fifth to second overall, as all of the other riders from Thursday’s break barring Træen were dropped from the main group. He thus remains at 2:33 back on the Norwegian race leader.

Træen himself continues uncertain of how long he can retain the top spot overall, and barring all disaster it seems all but certain he will hold onto la roja at least as far as Sunday’s category 1 summit finish at Valdezcaray. If he gets up Valdezcaray with the favourites – and Friday’s race suggested he was more than capable of doing that – then he could well hold until the harder mountain stages towards the end of the second week.

“To be honest, I’m not thinking about how many stages I can stay in the jersey, I’m just going day by day and we’ll see what happens,” Træen told reporters following his successful defence of the lead on stage 7.

For Vingegaard, the longer Træen and Bahrain do just that, the better.

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