The Race Is Hotting Up For The Final Week Of The 2018 Vuelta - Stage 17

Stage Results and Tomorrow’s Stage Preview

Image courtesy of pexels.com
Stage 17 was always going to be a tough stage. With the race coming to the interesting end after almost three weeks of racing, riders faced a 157km ride from Getxo to Balcon de Bizkaia. The tough stage beloged to canadian Michael Woods of EF Education First-Drapac who claimed victory at the top of a misty Balcon de Bizkaia. He managed to break away from his group of riders in the last 800m to take the win ahead of Dylan Teuns (Bel) BMC Racing Team and David De La Cruz (Spa) Team Sky

A break of 26 riders made their way clear of the peloton at the first major climb of the day and were able to steadily stretch their lead to over eight minutes as the stage continued. It was only until Astana pushed the peloton harder in the final hour of the stage that the gap started to come down. In the final climb of the race the break away group had been strung out and only 4 riders remained at the front and with 800m to go Woods made his move, taking him to victory.

Overall classification after stage Seventeen

Valverde reduced his gap to Yates in the overall classification and is now only 25 seconds behind. It now looks like the Red Jersey will be played out between these two as Quintana dropped back into seventh moving Enric Mas of Quick-Step Floors into third place, but still over a minute behind the leader.

1. Simon Yates (GBr) Mitchelton-Scott at 69 hours 5 minutes 34 seconds
2. Alejandro Valverde (Spa) Movistar Team at 25 seconds
3. Enric Mas (Spa) Quick-Step Floors at 1 minute 22 seconds

Tomorrow - Stage 18 Start Ejea de los Caballeros to Lleida

Stage 18 will present something a little different to riders and should be a welcome relief after the past week of riding. The stage will be 186km of almost not hills from Ejea de los Caballeros to Lleida.

Link to stage eighteen route map

So with no real hills to speak of this stage will most likely be a fast finish with the first three finishers recieving time bonuses of 10, 6 and 4 seconds.

I'll be covering each stage of the Vuelta A Espana, giving a breakdown of each days stage, my previous post for @cyclefeed were the results of stage sixteen of this years Vuelta, so feel free to have a look:
https://steemit.com/cycling/@run.vince.run/back-for-the-final-week-of-the-2018-vuelta-a-espana-stage-16

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Please Note all maps are made by myself using Strava