Let’s say you took any of the top 10 women’s WorldTour riders in the UCI rankings at the end of last year, and told them that in six months time they would win a major Classic and a Grand Tour in the space of three weeks. They’d be pretty chuffed, right? Now let’s say you told the same thing to 65th-ranked Paula Blasi (UAE Team Emirates ADQ), the duathlete who committed to professional cycling only two years ago. She’d probably tell you to politely do one.
Wait, there’s more! Not just any Grand Tour, but the pinnacle of cycling in her home nation, La Vuelta Femenina, where no Spaniard has ever taken home the maillot rojo – and ousting none other than Anna van der Breggen along the way.
So you can understand how 23-year-old Blasi might’ve been feeling as she crossed the line atop the mythical Alto de l’Angliru in second to win the general classification of this year’s edition, a mere 21 days after taking her first WorldTour win at Amstel Gold. The grimace on her face as she inched herself up the ascent in northern Spain stretched into a beaming smile, her arms open to welcome in glory. Chuffed might be an understatement.
Read more - A star is born: Paula Blasi announces her arrival with convincing Amstel Gold win
In a Vuelta edition shaped by crashes, late attacks, and sprint finishes – and which felt like SD Worx’s race to lose – the Spaniard had stayed close enough in the general classification fight until the final weekend test which suited her best. The taste of victory for Blasi was of course made sweeter by the Queen stage on which she was crowned: the impossible gradients of the Angliru, the cruelest climb in professional cycling featured in a women’s race for the first time. A dwindling oxygen supply twisted the knife for the peloton as the road pointed skyward, the ascent’s unfathomable steepness relayed to fans at home via the contorted faces trawling up a diagonal line across television screens. A quip posted on social media after the race by this year’s green jersey winner Lotte Kopecky helped to put things in perspective: “walking was the better option.”
Anything that happened on those slopes would therefore earn bragging rights to history, but it was the youngsters of the peloton who took the chance and ran. Blasi, Juliette Berthet (FDJ-Suez), Marion Bunel (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Petra Stiasny (Human Powered Health Team) – with a sprightly average age of 22 between them and spirit to match – made up the leading quartet on the final gradients after passing what remained of an early breakaway (Movistar's Liane Lippert) on the opening slopes of the climb. Stiasny led the group of favourites before Bunel pushed past, only to be dropped by a surging Blasi, until the Swiss rider retook the lead with just over two kilometres to go.
Out of the many adjectives (or profanities) one might use to describe the 24% ramp of L’Angliru’s most punishing sections, “beautiful” is probably the last pick – unless you’re 24-year-old Stiasny, who extolled its difficulty before the race and conquered the climb thereafter to take her first WorldTour victory with a flick of the wrist.
“I had only one thing in my head. Everyday, for me, it was a dream to win this stage," Stiasny told the TV cameras after the stage, her eyes wide with shock at what she’d just accomplished. "When I arrive at Angliru, I feel free. I feel in my place, in my happy place. This is my kind of climb, this is my gradient."
Meanwhile, the usual GC suspects were nowhere to be seen. Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-Sram) slipped backwards, as she had done in the previous stage. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike) cracked. Overnight leader Van der Breggen fought with characteristic grit, but couldn’t live up to the warning she’d issued her young rivals on the notorious wall of Les Praeres the day before. She let Blasi go with four kilometres to the finish. A lead undone, a veteran dethroned: unable to cling on, the former world champion slumped to a fifth place stage finish, taking third overall.
A few metres away, Spanish camera crews and journalists swarmed Blasi, who, bent over her handlebars, shook her head in disbelief. The latest star of cycling’s chronicle, and the real writer of their headlines: “¡Histórica Paula Blasi!”.
At the podium ceremony, before crowds gathered under the flag of her nation which billowed in the wind, Blasi spoke in English to thank her teammates. One rider who didn’t need a translation was her compatriot Mavi García, an athlete with an understanding of what such a monumental win means to a relative latecomer to the sport. García, who only began her professional cycling career at 31, is twenty years older than Blasi. As the Spanish national anthem rang out over the Asturian mountains, she waved to her fellow rider onstage.
In an interview with the race organisers in the lead up to this year’s Vuelta, the pair had spoken about their similarities. “She is just like me, but 20 years younger. We get along super well and we are quite similar. I feel we can speak about everything. There are many aspects of myself that I can recognise in her,” said García, who was also a duathlete before committing to cycling full-time.
Blasi had returned the sentiment: “We both like to put on good shows, go on the offensive and make the race hard. It’s good I have Mavi by my side, because she enjoys going deep but also knows when it’s time to rest.”
If there ever was a time and place for the Catalunya-born climber to dig deep, it was on that mountain-top summit finale, bolstered by the support of her mentor and spurned on by the proximity of success: “I was not really feeling my best, but the team did an amazing job, and I can only be grateful for that. The one thing I could do was just not think about [the climb]. I would have stopped, but I started seeing Anna van der Breggen struggling, and I said, ‘let’s go for it.’”
The final podium of this year’s Vuelta Femenina is a perfect picture, then, of the wider context of Blasi’s win, and of the magnitude of what it represents. Young stars Blasi, Stiasny and Bunel celebrate the biggest achievements of their short careers to date alongside Van der Breggen - one of cycling’s most lauded veterans with 64 victories to her name. Role models and their followers shine on the sport’s toughest stage, after the final leg of what was once a one-day token gesture tagged onto the men’s race, now a fully fledged Grand Tour. It’s a remarkable barometer of the state of women’s cycling in the current moment, and a teaser of what is still to come.
Blasi now sits second in the Women’s WorldTour rankings, with only Demi Vollering ahead of her. For la reina de la Vuelta celebrating with her team above the clouds, and for the rest of her generation, the sky really is the limit.
