The winner of the 81st Tour de Pologne, Jonas Vingegaard, has won the Vuelta a España!

The past three weeks in professional cycling have been marked by the battle in the Spanish Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España. The victory went to Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard of Team Visma | Lease a Bike, who last year also triumphed in the Tour de Pologne!

The third of the cycling Grand Tours — the Vuelta a España — has come to an end. As tradition goes, the final three-week race of the season was held in late August and early September. The competition took place mainly in Spain, though it all began in Italy, from where the riders made their way to the Iberian Peninsula.

The three-week contest tested the riders’ endurance and their all-around racing skills. The organizers prepared flat, hilly and mountainous stages, as well as individual and team time trials. Jonas Vingegaard of Team Visma | Lease a Bike entered the race as the clear favorite and ultimately claimed overall victory, winning three individual stages along the way.

In the general classification, he finished ahead of Joao Almeida of UAE Team Emirates-XRG. Interestingly, both riders have previously won the Tour de Pologne. The Dane claimed the Polish stage race title last year, while the Portuguese rider took the ORLEN General Classification leader’s jersey in 2021. But these weren’t the only Tour de Pologne connections at this year’s Vuelta.

On stage four, Ben Turner (INEOS Grenadiers) proved the fastest in a sprint from a reduced group, repeating in almost identical fashion the way he had won in Wałbrzych. Once again, Polish rider Michał Kwiatkowski played a big part in the Briton’s success.

Other stage winners in this year’s Vuelta also have victories from Poland on their palmarès — among them former world champion Mads Pedersen (Lidl–Trek), the best sprinter of the entire race, as well as the aforementioned Joao Almeida. The fact that so many Vuelta stage winners have also succeeded on Polish roads shows that the world’s top riders come to Poland to fight for the highest honours.