The Kern Pharma cyclist secured his second win in the Spanish tour and delivered a performance to remember.
Kern Pharma will never forget this Vuelta a España. A second-division team, invited to the event, crashed the party of the big names and pulled off one of the biggest surprises of the season by securing the victory with Pablo Castrillo. [Here’s how we lived through Pablo Castrillo’s stage victory at Cuitu Negru]
The Aragonese cyclist had already secured his first victory a few days ago at the Manzaneda Mountain Station, a memorable achievement for his team. But the feat he accomplished in this fifteenth stage, one of the most challenging days of La Vuelta a España, surpassed all imaginable limits.
Pablo Castrillo was one of the day’s protagonists by joining the breakaway, and he showed himself as one of the strongest as he reached the final climbs with two world-class riders like Vlasov and Sivakov.
On a day of high attrition, the initial ramps of Pajares cleared the scene in the breakaway, and with Sivakov always at the front, only Vlasov and a surprising Castrillo managed to stay on his wheel. There was still a long way to go, with the impossible slopes of Cuitu Negru ahead, and the favoritism for the stage win lay with the Russian and the Frenchman.
However, upon reaching the hardest section, in the last three kilometers, Castrillo made an extraordinary show of power, dropping his two breakaway companions. It seemed too early for those endless, hellish three kilometers, but that attack proved to be decisive.
Vlasov closed in on the Spaniard in the final meters, threatening to overtake him, but Castrillo summoned strength from nowhere to change the pace again and crossed the finish line victorious for the second time in this Vuelta. A historic day for the Kern Pharma structure with their second win in a Grand Tour.
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