Well, that was fun. For almost a decade, team time trials have been cycling’s forgotten discipline, the abandoned theme park where no one dares step foot. The Vuelta a España has been the rare exception, brave enough to repay the odd nostalgic visit, but the last time ended in darkness, chaos and a sweary Remco Evenepoel screaming into the TV cameras.
Stage five of the 2025 Vuelta was altogether a different proposition. It was edgy, chaotic in parts (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s Matteo Sobrero crashing into his teammate, for example), but also riveting and intensely competitive. Across 24km of Catalan countryside (the Vuelta is finally on home turf), there were shocks, surprises, and a great deal of intrigue.
The TTT is making a tentative comeback – the Tour de France will begin with one next year in Barcelona, ironically the sight of Remco’s rant – and based on this outing the sport deserves more of them. An individual time trial of a similar length can often drive a wedge through the GC competition and kill off the chances of many, but this created tantalising and closeable gaps. It has left the race, at its quarter mark, fantastically poised. The winners are many; the losers are few.
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To start with the happiest ones, UAE Team Emirates-XRG won the stage by eight seconds, the team’s first success of this year’s Vuelta after a quiet start – at least by their standards – to the race. Juan Ayuso and João Almeida remain tied on time and can’t be separated as co-leaders at this early juncture. But at some point they’ll have to be. For the moment, though, neither of them is the race lead – they’re both eight seconds shy of Jonas Vingegaard who boomeranged back into the red jersey after ceding it to David Gaudu 24 hours earlier.
Visma-Lease a Bike’s performance in and around Figueres was perplexing: at moments they were off the pace, and at others they were the fastest by some margin. At the first timing point they were just three seconds off the early pace-setters Ineos Grenadiers, but at the next one they had lost 14 seconds. They rebounded, however, to finish second fastest. TTTs are see-saw events, where the only predictability is that the yo-yo will rise and fall.
In the hot seat for a while were Lidl-Trek, and Giulio Ciccone, holding a nine seconds deficit to Vingegaard, was thinking that he was going to be the next man in the lead. Visma’s late charge put paid to that, but Ciccone remains well-placed in GC, and Lidl-Trek continue to be the best all-rounders in the race. Gaudu, meanwhile, limited his losses to just 16 seconds – far better than what could have been predicted. As for Ineos, strong starters before tailing off to finish fifth, Egan Bernal sits 22 seconds in arrears. He’d have taken that at the start of the race, especially with the big mountains, terrains where he excels, beginning on stage six. Bernal’s former teammate, Tom Pidcock, led an impressive result from Q36.5, and the Briton sits 30 seconds back from Vingegaard. "I think we did a really great time trial," he beamed.
Read more: Visma’s settled hierarchy and UAE’s dual leaders — what to expect as the Vuelta enters the Pyrenees
Jayco-Alula have cause for being a bit wounded, their leaders Ben O’Connor and Chris Harper shipping 44 seconds, but the latter can rebound from poor GC showings to win Grand Tour queen stages (see the Finestre at the Giro this year) and the former has a lot of form for bouncing back into the GC game with an audacious breakaway victory.
Aside from Jayco, few others will be disappointed with their day, and that’s credit to the team time trial levelling the playing field. The UCI doesn’t appear to have any desire to reintroduce the trade team time trial at the World Championships – last held in 2018 – but stage five of the Vuelta demonstrated clearly that the discipline still has a very valued place in the sport, in particular in Grand Tours. Certainly the narrative of this race is all the better for it.
