Entering second week as 10th in GC; what next for Pellizzari? "That's more important than the white jersey"

João Almeida already mentioned the "surprise effect" when asked how he viewed Jonas Vingegaard's acceleration. The Dane from Visma | Lease a Bike shook off the competition and delivered the first blow. Pellizzari also did not see that acceleration coming. “Jonas Vingegaard attacked really early in the climb. I was a little bit behind in the group, it surprised me a bit,” he said after the race to the organization.

Still, positioning wasn't the problem on Sunday. Because let's face it: Vingegaard looked a lot stronger than the rest. “But in the end, when you lose almost two minutes, it means he was just too strong,” the climber from Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe came to the same conclusion.

In any case, he felt good. "I had good legs, I felt good. The last part of the climb was a little bit easier. We tried our best with the team," said the Italian top talent, who entered the top 10 after a good team time trial on day five. In the stages to Andorra and Cerler, he performed just as well as the other leaders in the GC on the climbs, entering the ninth stage, the last stage before the rest day, in eighth place.

He ultimately enters the rest day in tenth place, after Tom Pidcock (Q36.5) and Felix Gall (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) leapfrog the Italian in the GC thanks to a good day. How does the new number 10 and leader in the youth classification view what is yet to come? “We’ll see how it goes in the next mountain stage. The GC is more important than the white jersey. I want to do my best with Jai [Hindley] and we’ll see in Madrid if I’m in white or not.”

After the rest day, the second week of the Vuelta starts with a new uphill test. The tenth stage is very similar to Sunday's stage in terms of the route, with another uphill finish after a fairly flat route.