Wout van Aert powers to Vuelta stage seven win as Ben O’Connor stays in red

Wout van Aert grabbed his second stage win at this edition of the Vuelta a España on Friday, while Ben O’Connor maintained a commanding overall lead.
Van Aert added to his win on stage three with another dominant performance to take the seventh stage. The Belgian rider sprinted to claim victory in four hours, 15 minutes. Mathias Vacek (Lidl-Trek) was second, with Spain’s Pau Miquel Delgado (Kern Pharma) third.
The 180.5km ride from Archidona to Córdoba included one categorised climb, Alto del 14%, late in the stage, but with 26km to the finish, and a flat run after the descent, a bunch sprint was the expected outcome.
The pace set by Red Bull and Primoz Roglic on the climb brought a split in the race, however, with a leading bunch of 33 riders left to battle for the stage win. Australia’s Kaden Groves, winner of stage two, crashed as he attempted to make his way back to the leaders, which took one of Van Aert’s main rivals out of the final sprint.
Marc Soler (UAE Team Emirates) attempted to get away on the descent, and it was Van Aert who went in pursuit but he then let his teammate and the defending champion, Sepp Kuss, take over the work. Soler was reeled in, and although his teammate, Pavel Sivakov, tried to steal a march, he was caught and once Van Aert took to the front close to the finish line, the winner was never in doubt.
“I expected it to be a way bigger group to go to the finish. I knew the climb on the circuit was hard but I didn’t expect that the race would explode like it did,” Van Aert said. “Sepp did such an amazing job, I don’t think people know what it’s like when you’re below 60kg and you do those kinds of pulls on the flat.”
“We always had this stage in mind for Wout but we knew it would be hard, especially with the pace on the last climb,” Kuss said. “The pace was hard but when I saw Wout there I knew he was on a good day. It was a ‘suffer fest’ to pull Soler back but it feels like a victory for me too.”
Roglic, the pre-race favourite, only managed to take six seconds off O’Connor’s lead, taking the bonus seconds when he was first at the top of the climb. “I can’t really do much against Primoz’s sprint for the bonuses, but you have to take a lot of bonuses to make up that amount of time,” Australia’s O’Connor said.
O’Connor (Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale), who took the red jersey after winning stage six in dramatic fashion, still has a 4min 45sec lead over three-times former champion Primoz Roglic (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe).
Saturday’s eighth stage is a 159km hilly ride from Ubeda to Cazorla. A mountain stage from Motril to Granada follows on Sunday before the first rest day as the race heads to the north of Spain.