Geraint Thomas and Luke Rowe know how this Vuelta will play out: 'It's all balls to the wall with them'

The 2026 Vuelta a España won’t go down in history as the most exciting Grand Tour ever, if things continue this way. Tadej Pogačar has already firmly secured the red leader’s jersey after just a few days and doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans to give it up. Geraint Thomas, Luke Rowe and Thijs Zonneveld all agree on their separate podcasts, that this Vuelta is done and dusted.

Speaking on their Watts Occurring podcast after stage 5, Thomas and Rowe look into the history of riders that have led a Grand Tour from day 1: 'There are four riders who have done it in the history of the Giro," said Rowe. "There are six riders who have done it in the history of the Tour, but all a very long time ago. Rominger is the most recent at the Vuelta, like I said, in ‘94."

"The most recent in the Tour de France is Eddie Merckx, in 1970. So in the current era no one's ever done it, but potentially Pogi can?" asks Rowe. "Yeah, they [UAE, ed.] definitely can, can't they?" agreed Thomas. "It's just if they want to protect the team by giving the jersey away for a few days, but why would they?" the former Tour de France winner asked.

Thomas continued: "If they've got it, they're going to do it. That's what they do, isn’t it? That's how they race. It's all balls to the wall with them. I'd put money on them keeping it [the red jersey, ed.]."

Speaking on his podcast In de Waaier, Dutch journalist Thijs Zonneveld also expected this approach from Pogačar and UAE.

"The route is, of course, designed throughout the year to get Pogačar to the starting line: starting in Monaco and featuring a few very tough stages right from the first few days, so that he can quickly build up a big lead and turn the rest of the Vuelta into a training camp. You can hardly miss it—that’s exactly what happened,” he said.

"The fact that he won that first time trial came as a surprise to me, especially since it was a technical time trial. But the fact that he would win on day three seemed completely logical to me, and you could already see coming that he would win by a wide margin on day four. You could have predicted it. The only question was: where would he go, and how big would his lead be?"

"This is exactly what he wanted," Zonneveld continues. "To decide the Vuelta right away, ride in the red from start to finish after that time trial victory in Monaco, and control the race in such a way that he stays fit and fresh for the World and European Championships. From now on, he’ll simply pick the days he wants to strike and put his team to work to control the race.”

"Maybe they'll make another move at some point, but otherwise they'll keep it under control. He wants to race the way he did in the second half of the Tour: play it safe. That way, he’ll stay fresh, and he won’t have to be “on” every day to fend off attacks. He makes it clear right away: ‘Guys, you’re riding for second place,’ says Zonneveld.

"The rest of the peloton immediately reflected that sentiment. In that stage to Andorra, they were riding purely for the podium spots. Everyone accepted that, except for Felix Gall, who was still going for it. But in the end, even he was just riding for second place. Decathlon also admitted afterward that they weren’t at all focused on isolating UAE or hurting Pogačar. They simply wanted to gain an edge over the competition for the podium on those climbs,” he analyzes.

"So they just ride as if that one cyclist in the red isn't even in the race. It’s a grim reality, but the illusion that Pogačar can be beaten has completely vanished among the competition. That sense of fooling yourself and believing in the impossible—which is often what makes elite sports so beautiful—is simply gone here. There are very few riders who believe they can challenge him, and the men who actually can aren’t racing in this Vuelta,” he says, referring, among others, to Jonas Vingegaard.