The Descent That Dropped Juan Ayuso: How Roglič Broke UAE's Last Itzulia Card On The Road To Lemoa
It did not happen on the climb. That is the first, strange and most important fact of Juan Ayuso's Itzulia Basque Country queen stage. He survived the Elorritxueta. He held Primož Roglič's wheel from the moment Roglič launched the decisive attack 2.6 kilometres from the summit to the very top of the climb, gap stabilised at zero, heart rate 188, power 412W. On the television pictures there was a moment, crossing the KOM line, when Ayuso looked like he would still be the second-place rider into Galdakao. Then the road tipped downward, and everything changed.
The Elorritxueta descent is a 4.8-kilometre drop back towards Lemoa on a narrow, shaded, greasy-in-April road that has a reputation among Basque riders for being simultaneously fast and unpredictable. It is exactly the terrain on which Roglič has historically separated himself from the pure climbers. Ayuso is a good descender by WorldTour standards but not an elite one, and the 22-year-old himself has conceded in interviews that technical descents at race pace are "the only place I still feel I have work to do." On Thursday, Roglič found the work.
The telemetry, shared to selected outlets by the Slovenian's Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe performance staff on Thursday evening, shows that Roglič hit 84 km/h on the third hairpin below the summit — four km/h faster than Ayuso measured on the same corner. Across the first two kilometres of the descent alone, Roglič opened 11 seconds on the Spaniard. By the valley road towards Lemoa the gap had stabilised at 22 seconds, and by the moment the Slovenian bridged to the lone remaining breakaway rider 18 kilometres from the line it was 36 seconds and climbing. Ayuso, alone, in no-man's land, was already racing for third at best.
The cruelty of the sequence was that Ayuso's only hope of retaking the wheel was for Roglič to soft-pedal in the valley — and Roglič had no reason to. With Paul Seixas still up the road with Gall and O'Connor, the stage win was the Slovenian's only real prize on the day. His interest was in riding away as fast as possible. Ayuso's interest was in catching back on. The two goals were incompatible and the road was flat. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe DS Patxi Vila summed it up on Eurosport twenty minutes after the finish: "Once Primož hit the valley road, the race for second was finished. It was just a question of how many seconds."
The tactical damage goes well beyond the 1'08" Ayuso ultimately conceded to Roglič on the stage. With Del Toro already out of the race after the stage 3 crash, Ayuso was UAE Team Emirates-XRG's last card at the Itzulia Basque Country and the Emirati squad's designated Ardennes Classics leader in Pogačar's absence. Losing him from the front group on a descent — not to a bigger engine, not to a bad day, not to illness, but to a technical weakness that everybody in the sport already knew about — leaves UAE with an uncomfortable conversation to have before Brabantse Pijl on 15 April.
That conversation is already beginning. Speaking in the UAE team bus in Galdakao forty minutes after the finish, sports director Andrej Hauptman chose his words carefully: "Juan had a very good Elorritxueta. The descent is where we have to keep working. It is not a surprise to us and it is not a surprise to him." The more interesting comment came from Ayuso himself, who at the post-stage flash interview said, without being asked, "I am going to ride that road again on Sunday morning. I need to know where I lost him." That is the voice of a rider who knows exactly where his ceiling has been found and is unwilling to leave the Basque Country without understanding it.
For the Seixas narrative, Ayuso's collapse is a footnote — the 19-year-old did not lose a second on the stage and rode the last 400 metres at 648 watts to retake second on the line. For the UAE narrative, it is the centrepiece. With Pogačar in Lille preparing for Paris-Roubaix and Adam Yates still recovering from his spring illness, UAE now arrive at the Ardennes Classics with their designated back-up leader publicly cracked on a descent that every rival team now has marked in red. Amstel Gold Race has a descent off the Keutenberg. Flèche Wallonne has the Côte de Cherave. Liège-Bastogne-Liège has the Côte de la Redoute and the Côte de la Roche-aux-Faucons, both with descents that separate climbers from bike-handlers. The road to the Ardennes just got a lot steeper for Juan Ayuso.
Two days after his Lemoa drop, Roglič was philosophical. "Descending is a skill like any other," the Slovenian told a small group of Spanish reporters at dinner in the Red Bull team hotel. "You can train it. You cannot train it the week before an Ardennes Classic. But you can train it over a winter." Ayuso, whose next winter is eight months away, does not have that luxury. His next test comes on 19 April on the Cauberg. The clock is already running.