Colombian Miguel Angel Lopez on Sunday won the mountainous 15th stage of the Vuelta a Espana, while Tour de France winner Chris Froome tacked a few seconds onto his overall lead.
A late surge by Froome over the final meters of the punishing ride over two category 1 and a final special category ascent allowed him to grow the gap over Vincenzo Nibali of Bahrain-Merida.
“It’s all small steps at this stage,” Team Sky’s Froome said about the six seconds he added to his advantage over Nibali, increasing it to 1 minute, 1 second.
Photo: AFP
The result allowed Froome to turn around the previous days’ trend of Nibali pecking away at the British rider’s comfortable advantage.
Astana’s Lopez attacked with Trek-Segafredo’s Alberto Contador near the start of the stage’s final climb. Lopez then set off on his own to pass breakaway rider Adam Yates of Orica-Scott and power his way to the summit finish at Alto Hoya de la Mora.
Lopez finished the 129.4km stage in 3 hours, 34 minutes, 51 seconds. He also moved up to sixth overall at 2:51 off Froome’s pace.
Lopez, 23, claimed his first Grand Tour win on Wednesday last week when he won a similarly tough mountain stage finishing at the Calar Alto summit.
“We decided to ride with Contador when he made a great attack, and I thought I had good legs and it all went off well,” Lopez said. “There are many hard stages to go. The Vuelta is not over and we will go forward step by step.”
The route in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains ended with almost 28km of continuous ascent.
Nibali also launched a late attack to test Froome, but it did not pay off as Froome got help from his teammates Mikel Nieve and Wout Poels to keep Nibali in sight — and then reeled the Italian in before beating him to the finish line.
“I just have a huge, huge thank you for my teammates. There were a lot of big attacks today, but they stayed with me and controlled the speed,” Froome said.
Froome, a four-time Tour de France champion, has finished the Vuelta runner-up three times.
Ilnur Zakarin of Team Katusha-Alpecin moved into third place overall at 2:08 behind Froome.
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