Domestique Cycling Podcast

Enric Mas reaches the second rest day of the Vuelta a España in red, 2:06 ahead of Felix Gall and 2:10 ahead of Primož Roglič. The man with four Vuelta podiums and no Grand Tour win is now the favourite, and Bram and Ethan spend this episode working out whether he can actually finish the job.

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Mas took 27 seconds at Calar Alto and another 25 on La Pandera, and Movistar have controlled this race in a way nobody expected from them. That leads to the argument that runs through the whole episode: with Tadej Pogačar out and his season now over, does this Vuelta come with an asterisk next to it? Bram says it should not. Ethan says nobody looks up who crashed out twenty years later.

Then the heat. 41 degrees on the road to Loja, riders taken to hospital, and Sunday's stage into Córdoba cut by 79.5 kilometres under the extreme weather protocol. Both hosts think the measures are the right ones and both think they are aimed at the wrong end of the day, with the Vuelta moving finishes later for television rather than starting in the cool of the morning.

There is a lot of good racing in here too. Wout van Aert won twice in three days and controlled the whole finale in Córdoba, Visma are on five stage wins with three of them from Matthew Brennan on his Grand Tour debut, and Jakob Omrzel and Marco Brenner produced the two surprises of the week. Bram and Ethan then look at the final week: the Jerez time trial, Peñas Blancas, the brutal stage 20 to Collado del Alguacil, and a Granada finish that is not a parade.

Plus the Tour of Britain, where Tim Wellens took the overall and UAE filled the podium on the final stage in Earlston. Ethan was at stage 1 in Lincoln to see Lewis Askey win.

A heads up on the end of this one: Bram's internet dropped in the middle of the Tour of Britain section, so the episode finishes earlier than usual.

Finn Fisher-Black joined Aidan Burgess on the first rest day of the Vuelta a España, four days after Tadej Pogačar crashed out of a race he was leading by nearly four minutes.

He is honest about his former teammate. People assume Pogačar wins so often that a bad day cannot really hurt, and Fisher-Black says that is exactly backwards. Everyone starts each race the same, everyone wants to win, and nobody turns up to a Grand Tour without doing the work. He explains how the news travelled through the bunch, how quickly the racing stopped, and how close his own team came to being caught in the same crash.

Then the race that is left. Fisher-Black rides for Primož Roglič, who was hit by a car on a training camp only weeks before the start and could barely get on a bike. Nobody in the team knew what they had until the racing began. He talks about how you read Roglič's mood, why the calm version is the fast one, and why he thinks the last week will be the best one.

There is also the tactical picture. With UAE no longer policing the race, nobody seems to want the job, and Fisher-Black explains why that opens up breakaway after breakaway, why he still fancies a move with Jay Vine and Pavel Sivakov in it, and how much freedom he gets while his leader sits second overall.

Plus the Monaco time trial and rolling out of a casino, the warm-up he makes up as he goes, the hail on the Font Romeu stage and the hotel that took the peloton in, the five-star reviews that got deleted, the mattress in the background of the call, the drink bottle scrums, and why he still wants to go back to the track.

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Tadej Pogacar took the first red jersey of his career in Monaco by nine hundredths of a second. Ethan Hayter lost it on the line, then spent all of Sunday in the breakaway trying to take it back, and finished the day 29 seconds down. In Manosque, Wout van Aert attacked with two kilometres to go and Pogacar closed him down, then refused to pull. Behind them, 20-year-old Matthew Brennan came past both to win his first Grand Tour stage, on his first ever road stage at a three-week race. Two days in and this Vuelta has already given us more than the preview suggested it would.

We go through the Monaco time trial and how nobody crashed on a course full of tunnels, cones and an F1 hairpin. We get into what Pogacar's ride actually tells us, and the moment he stopped riding for Josh Tarling and went full gas. Then we look ahead. Font Romeu and its one long shallow climb, the short Andorra stage that shouts breakaway, the sprint on stage 5, and the gravel with bonus seconds on top of it on stage 6. We also cover Visma's very crowded sprint train, Felix Gall's 46 seconds, and the influencer the Vuelta hired for its social channels, which has gone about as badly as it could. Plus Kim Le Court winning the Tour of Britain Women, Jasper Philipsen taking three stages and the overall at the Renewi Tour, and Isaac del Toro winning the Deutschland Tour.

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Magnus Cort is retiring at the end of 2026, and he tells Aidan Burgess exactly why. He is still winning, he became Danish champion for the first time this year, and that is the point. He does not want to squeeze everything out and finish the sport struggling at the back.
He also confirms his selection for the Vuelta a España, the Grand Tour he likes best and the one where his career started with two stage wins. He talks through where his chances are, why Mads Pedersen and Wout van Aert worry him more than Tadej Pogačar, and how a team of only Danes and Norwegians keeps punching above its budget.
And he is honest about what comes next. There is no job lined up, only a winter in Andorra, and a rider who says he almost does not know who he is outside of cycling. There is also the moustache, the worst hotel in the Tour de France, and one very firm opinion about ankle socks.

Tadej Pogacar arrives at the Vuelta a España chasing the one Grand Tour missing from his palmares, seven years after finishing third here on debut at twenty. Primoz Roglic is now expected to start, five weeks after being hit by a car in training, still hoping for a fifth title that would make him the outright record holder. Felix Gall and Oscar Onley come in off the back of Burgos, where five seconds separated them, and on Monday morning Visma confirmed that defending champion Jonas Vingegaard will not race again this season. We don't think the GC battle is really a battle at all, but the podium behind Pogacar is wide open, and we go through all 21 stages to work out who takes it.

We cover the Monaco time trial and its F1 corners, the brutal short stage into Andorra, and the gravel sections and punchy finishes that should suit the breakaway all through week one. We get into the Alto de Aitana and the heat that comes with it, the Jerez time trial that could cost Felix Gall his podium spot, and the queen stage to the Collado del Alguacil, the only Categoría Especial climb of the race. Then we lay out our predictions for the podium and the green jersey, talk about what a "day by day" Vuelta actually looks like for Roglic, and go through the riders worth watching beyond the favourites.

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We're back for the Vuelta. Pick the rider you think will finish highest on every stage. You can only use each rider once across the whole race, and your score is their time behind the stage winner minus a bonus of 10, 6 or 4 seconds for a top three finish. It runs like its own GC, from Monaco on Saturday through to Granada on 13 September, and it's free. Come beat us at https://peloton.domestiquecycling.com/predict