It’s pretty romantic and commendable what Alberto did today, being his last ever race and he’s so competitive and so fierce up the front. What a way to end his career. If I can do that when I decide to call it quits, I’d be chuffed to bits.
Alberto is Alberto Contador and the year was 2017. He had just won the Angliru stage of the Vuelta, the penultimate stage of the race and the penultimate day of Contador’s career with only the procession to Madrid to finish.
Contador had never looked like winning his final Grand Tour overall. In fact, he hadn’t won a race throughout all of 2017. But he was such a ferocious competitor that he almost bent the entire race to his will that day to ensure that he would have a perfect ending to his career.
There’s a stat I always like about Contador which I think sums up a lot of the way he raced. He won seven Grand Tours (or nine if you’re into that sort of thing), but he never finished second or third in a Grand Tour. It was truly win or bust.
He even illustrated this right up to the very final seconds of his career. Coming into Madrid in the final kilometre of his final day as a professional, he was sitting in fourth place overall, but he sat up. Allowed himself to be dropped by the peloton so he could wave for the crowd and have his moment.
He lost seven seconds on the lead group, enough to cede fourth place to Wilco Kelderman. Contador didn’t care one bit. You win, or you’re nothing. Fourth place or fifth place on G.C…. no difference.
The winner of the race overall was Chris Froome who had just completed the Tour/Vuelta double, only the third rider ever to do that after Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault and the first to do it since the Vuelta moved from Spring to Autumn. And no rider has done it since. Froome would go on to win the Giro in 2018 meaning he held all three Grand Tour titles at the same time - something only previously done by Hinault and Eddy Merckx.
Froome was the best G.C rider in the world. Froome is also the source of the quote we started with.
Little did he know that after that 2017 Vuelta he would only win at one more race for the rest of his career. He won two stages at the 2018 Giro, including the ‘did a Landis’ one which gave him the overall win - and that was that. No more wins.
That was nearly seven years ago and Froome is still going.
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