{"id":564575,"date":"2026-03-27T15:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T15:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/564575\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T15:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T15:22:09","slug":"vingegaard-takes-control-of-volta-a-catalunya-on-summit-finish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/564575\/","title":{"rendered":"Vingegaard takes control of Volta a Catalunya on summit finish"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Vallter 2000 got chopped from the end of Thursday\u2019s stage, Coll de Pal was ready for its close up as Friday\u2019s HC-rated summit finish. The climb turned out to be a real pal to Jonas Vingegaard, who won the day\u2019s flowers and took over the race lead from Dorian Godon. Tom Pidcock had a bad day at the office, crashing on a descent and disappearing from the top-10, and Remco Evenepoel dropped off the podium. <\/p>\n

Preliminaries<\/p>\n

Having won two stages, race leader Dorian Godon led Pidcock on GC by 13 seconds, Evenepoel by 14 seconds and Vingegaard by 24 seconds. Other GC contenders were in a clot of 51 guys at +0:26. <\/p>\n

Not having a good race, Derek Gee-West did not start on Friday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Course<\/p>\n

Friday flung a handful of heavy hitters at the peloton over 155 km. First came Cat. 1 Port Colldarnat before Cat. 2 Coll de Josa, the rather steep Cat. 1 Coll de Fumanya, penultimate ascent Collada Sobirana and then HC-rated Coll de Pal, 16.4-km of 7.2 percent. Well, that was the original plan\u2013again the threat of wind trimmed the route, taking 2.2 km off the Coll de Pal.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The first big summit finish. Image by La FlammeRouge<\/p>\n

Surely, there was no way that mountains classification leader Baptiste Veistroffer was going to miss the opportunity to pad his 22-point lead. Nope, the Frenchman missed out on the small breakaway and Gee-West\u2019s teammate Giulio Ciccone started to chip away at Veistroffer\u2019s lead, scoring maximum points on Port Colldarnat and Coll de Josa. Coll de Fumanya went Ciccone\u2019s way too, and suddenly he was only 14 points in arrears. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ciccone won the 2023 Tour de France polka dots and the 2019 Giro d\u2019Italia KOM. Photo: Sirotti<\/p>\n

After Cat. 1 Collada Sobirana, Ciccone trailed Veistroffer by four points. There were crashes in the peloton on the descent, UAE-Emirates\u2019 Jo\u00e3o Almeida and Brandon McNulty among the riders on the deck. This fractured the field. Pidcock wasn\u2019t accounted for. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>What on earth was going on here? Moving cars and racers sharing a tunnel?<\/p>\n

Ciccone spread his wings and flew towards the base of Coll de Pal. Ciccone still led by a minute with 13 km to climb. Ineos powered the peloton. The GC chaps started jabbing at one another into a headwind, which streamlined the peloton to 20 riders. Felix Gall, his teammate Lenny Martinez and Florian Lipowitz flew the coop. <\/p>\n

With 7 km to race, Vingegaard attacked, bringing several fellows over to Gall et al. Evenepoel couldn\u2019t hang, leaving Lipowitz as Red Bull\u2019s main man. Ciccone was caught with 6 km to go and then Vingegaard bid adios to everyone. When he saw the red kite, the Lipowitz-Gall chase was a full minute behind. <\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s final summit finish of the 105th edition is a Cat. 1 climb up to Queralt, but the brutal Coll de Predell in the middle of the route has an average grade of 11 percent in its final 5.5 km. Yowza.<\/p>\n

2026 Volta a Catalunya, Stage 4
1) Jonas Vingegaard (Denmark\/Visma-Lease a Bike) 4:13:44
2) Felix Gall (Austria\/Decathlon-CMA) +0:51
3) Lenny Martinez (France\/Bahrain-Victorious) +1:01<\/p>\n

2026 Volta a Catalunya GC
1) Jonas Vingegaard (Denmark\/Visma-Lease a Bike) 19:44:45
2) Felix Gall (Austria\/Decathlon-CMA) +0:57
3) Lenny Martinez (France\/Bahrain-Victorious) +1:09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Vallter 2000 got chopped from the end of Thursday\u2019s stage, Coll de Pal was ready for its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564576,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[78767,217761,49,48,635,162059,5900,75504,50413,82,11588],"class_list":["post-564575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-2026-uci-worldtour","tag-2026-volta-a-cataluna","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-derek-gee-west","tag-jonas-vingegaard","tag-michael-leonard","tag-pier-andre-cote","tag-sports","tag-spotlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564575\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}