There Is a Three Week Bicycle Race Going On and This Desk Has Never Once Mentioned It

At climbing speeds the wind is no longer the main enemy, gravity is, and drafting saves far less. The group comes apart and each rider goes at whatever their own power to weight ratio allows. That is why the overall standings are made in the high stages and why a rider can lose a grand tour in forty minutes on a mountain after defending it for a fortnight.

It is also why grand tour winners tend to be small. Watts per kilogram is the number, and the denominator is a person.

The team part, which is the least understood

Eight riders on a team, one of whom is trying to win. The other seven have jobs.

They shelter the leader from the wind for hours, fetch bottles from the team car, give up their own bicycle if the leader punctures, and ride themselves to a standstill at the front of a climb to burn off rivals before dropping away entirely. A domestique who finishes an hour down has often had the best day on the team.

This is the part that makes cycling worth an outsider's attention. It is an endurance sport organised as a collective sacrifice, scored individually, in public, for three weeks.

Why the Vuelta specifically

It is the third of the three grand tours, after the Giro d'Italia in May and the Tour de France in July, and it has a reputation as the wild one.

The Tour is the one everybody watches and is often controlled to the point of tedium by a dominant team. The Vuelta arrives at the end of a long season, with riders who have already peaked once, on brutally steep and short Spanish climbs, in September heat. Races come apart in it. Reputations get made by people who spent August as somebody else's helper.

This one starting in Monaco and ending in Granada is a long way from a purely Spanish route, which is now normal: grand tours sell their opening days abroad, and the money is real.

How to watch ten stages without watching thirty hours

Two rules. Ignore the flat days unless you like sprints, and read the profile before you commit an afternoon.

Every stage is published as an elevation diagram. If it ends with a steep climb, the last hour will decide something and is worth watching live. If it is flat, the last fifteen minutes are the whole story. The mountain stages in the final week are where the Vuelta is won, and there are still ten stages to go.

We have written about how the region has bought its way into the calendar of most other sports, in the Gulf's sporting decade, and about the sport that actually took hold locally in the rise of padel. Road cycling has not arrived here in the same way, for reasons that have a great deal to do with heat and roads and very little to do with interest.