Vuelta, Roglic makes his voice heard at the first uphill finish: his is the red jersey

There is little to be done when it comes to Vuelta he’s always the one to raise his hand, Primoz Roglic. At the first uphill finish the Slovenian didn’t think twice: a final joke in the narrow sprint and the red jersey snatched away from Wout Van Aert. In the fourth stage, Plasencia – Pico Villuercas, 170.5 kilometers long, the Bora captain managed the last uphill stretch, with those three very tough kilometers that filtered the group: the final push was enough to take the jersey and the stage, to look down on everyone and already direct the battle for the general classification.

Today’s stage was animated by Bruno Armirail (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), Sylvain Moniquet (Lotto Dstny), Filippo Zana (Jayco-AlUla), Pablo Castrillo (Kern Pharma) and Mikel Bizkarra (Euskaltel-Euskadi), the five leaders maintained a maximum advantage of 3 minutes with about 50 kilometers to go: in the final stages the leading group lost men, thanks to the work of Bora and UAE, who closed the gap with about 5 kilometers to go.

In the final stretch, with maximum gradients of up to 20 percent, Roglic made the difference by leading a small group of six riders, who reached Pico Villuercas: Lennert Van Eetvelt tried to surprise everyone, but when the Belgian had already raised his arms to celebrate, it was Roglic who placed his wheel in front of everyone. Third Joao Almeida, 8″ behind the 2021 winner in the general classification, third Enric Mas at 32″, fourth the Italian Anthony Tiberiusnow leader of the youth rankings.