Icons of cycling: Angliru
The most severe climb of the 2017 Vuelta has a fearsome reputation
or every rider who has ever suffered the slopes of the Angliru, blame Miguel Prieto. On September 23 1997, the then communications director of the charity ONCE wrote a letter to the organisers of the Vuelta a España that included a paragraph that would change cycling history.
“There exists in Asturias, about 15 kilometres from Oviedo, a mountain whose road is hardly referenced on the map,” wrote Prieto. “This mountain is known as La Gamonal.” Prieto went on to provide delicious details of a climb that was “sprinkled with multiple ramps of 20 per cent, 18 per cent, 17 per cent and even 23 per cent”. Prieto wrote that if it was ever to be included in the Vuelta those who saw it would never forget it.
A little less than two years later the Vuelta finished atop La Gamonal, renamed as Alto de l’angliru by the race, for the first time. José Maria Jiménez entered history as the first rider to win on a climb that would quickly join the pantheon of feared Grand Tour ascents.
Spectacular struggle
The hardest section of the Angliru comes around 3km from the summit. It is here that thousands of spectators come, creating a narrow corridor of noise as the poor souls battling this pitiless yet spectacular mountain struggle against the worst that nature can throw at them.
Oscar Sevilla once described the climb as inhumane and in 2002 Britain’s David Millar famously stopped just metres from the line and quit the race having crashed multiple times on the treacherous road to the bottom of the climb. He was protesting against an organisation which had made the peloton ride a dangerous descent in the wet but his actions were interpreted as a reaction against the climb itself. In his book Racing through the Dark Millar writes that his name is now always linked to the Angliru despite posting “possibly one of the slowest-ever times for the climb”.
In 2011 Bradley Wiggins was leading the Vuelta by seven seconds over his team-mate Chris Froome going into the Angliru stage. On its brutal slopes Wiggins faltered as Juan José Cobo soloed to the summit before Froome got the nod to ride for himself. Cobo went on to win the overall with Froome second by 13 seconds in the race that announced him as a Grand Tour contender.
The Angliru has been used sparingly, with the 2017 stage just the seventh time the Vuelta has visited. That time round Froome all but secured his first Vuelta on the climb, riding away from his rivals as Alberto Contador brought the curtain down on his career, winning a stage that will live long in the memory and becoming the first man to record two victories on this, the Vuelta’s most revered climb.