Welcome back to the Lantern Rouge Cycling Podcast, my name is Benji and today we'll have to do it only me because Lantern is unable to make it, unfortunately, it's nothing bad, so no need to worry about any illnesses or anything, he's alright, so that's positive news.

Despite that, I've always got the support of you all, but also by our wonderful sponsor, Photovalta and the past hero, that is Nicole.

Nicole is a brand known to create cycling apparel for teams in the world tour, but also for you, in general, they're goal is to make the perfect kid when it comes to the performance on the road.

They focus on the road only, they've got plenty of products that I use myself, and I already used it before they started sponsoring us, that's a pretty important detail.

Additionally, I feel like it's one of the perfect partners for us because they allow us to bring our content the way we want it, with a focus on quality just as much that they are doing on their own because their kids are generally amazing, and that is also why Bahrain McLaren is using it in the world tour, and otherwise I don't think Bahrain McLaren would be using their kid if it was not a good performance road kid.

But all in all, thank you Nicole for sponsoring our concept on our series, and let's dive into today's stage of La Vuelta.

I'm pretty sure that most of you are listening for the incident in the sprint, and let me already spoil something major.

I've been blocked by the cunning quick step on Twitter as a consequence of retweeting their social media message and saying that it's an incorrect assessment, so that's a new one.

But I'll take this on objectively, if I won't let this influence my view on this stage, I had a pretty clear view of what happened in the stage already, and how I felt about it.

But let's start off by the beginning, we've got two rank riders, that is, I guess, from Kaharudal and also Juan Felipe Azurio from Burgos BH.

Those are two riders that you can expect in this kind of stage, there's no one in the peloton really waging to get in a break away on a stage that it destined to go to these sprinters.

And we see that directly once in the break away to pro conti riders.

No one else really, so there was no clear battle for anybody major to go into the break away to try and make this one special.

It was clear that the only people up there were going to be pro conti riders that tried to show their brand and their sponsor to the Spanish public.

We saw directly after in the peloton, we saw the controlling teams, UAE, but mainly the kerning trying to control the pace to make sure that break away does not get too much time.

And try out the whole stage, they kept it at around two minutes and 30 seconds, something around that to make sure that they can reel them into the end of the stage.

I can spoil it already, that perfectly happened the way that the sprinter teams were planning it.

Now, I do have to mention that there was a crash in the middle of the stage, hector size, a kahdudal rider was not looking to ride when he crashed in his helmet broke.

But he did continue onwards and he stepped on his bike again after four minutes of talking to a medical person at the back of the race.

He decided to get back on his bike or the team decided to put him back on his bike, whether he has concussions or not.

No one really knows, I think that the doctor would be able to assess that pretty easily.

It looked like his head was not the major issue he had.

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