Cunego!

Today's stage of la Vuelta was a great one,very exciting and with lots of attacks.

9 men formed a breakaway and built a big advantadge on the leader group.These 9 riders were Cunego,Alan Perez,Fuglsang (yay!),Knees,Palomares,Gonzalo Rabanal,Tankink,Xavier Florencio and De Weert.

With about 30 kms to go the advantadge of the "escapados" was of 8 minutes,but soon it started to decrease because of Euskaltel's and Caisse d'Epargne's efforts at the head of the peloton.

The final climb (divided in 2 Gpm) began with about 20 kms to go.Palomares attacked a lot of time on the first part of the climb (the longest but easiest one),but with 14 kms to go it was Damiano Cunego's time for attacking.The Little Prince soon started to gain time on the other 8 companions,while in the leader group Liquigas started to set the pace.

Zaugg,Kreuziger,Carlstrom and Szmyd did a great work on the climb and Basso attacked with 4 kms to go.Valverde lost some meters from the Italian rider,that was soon joined by Evans, Gesink and Mosquera in his action.Valverde was overpassed also by Samuel Sanchez,but then he managed to get over that bad moment and joined again the 4 riders (the olympic champion Sanchez did the same).Then Basso lost some meters,while Sanchez and Mosquera gained time on the other GC riders.In the meanwhile,Cunego had already crossed the finish-line and won his 2nd stage in this year's Vuelta.Gesink and Valverde then managed to drop Basso and Evans,and then Valverde also managed to gain few seconds on Gesink.

Second came a great Jakob Fuglsang (did he read what I wrote yesterday,perhaps?),while 3rd was Sanchez.4th came Mosquera,while 5th was Valverde.Gesink came in 6th,while Evans was 7th and Basso 9th.Here's the new GC Top 10:
1 Alejandro Valverde (Spa) Caisse d'Epargne
2 Robert Gesink (Ned) Rabobank 0:00:31
3 Samuel Sánchez (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 0:01:10
4 Ivan Basso (Ita) Liquigas 0:01:28
5 Cadel Evans (Aus) Silence-Lotto 0:01:51
6 Ezequiel Mosquera (Spa) Xacobeo Galicia 0:01:54
7 Joaquím Rodríguez (Spa) Caisse d'Epargne 0:05:53
8 Paolo Tiralongo (Ita) Lampre-NGC 0:06:24
9 Tom Danielson (USA) Garmin-Slipstream 0:08:28
10 Juan José Cobo (Spa) Fuji-Servetto 0:10:45

I must say I'm happy about the stage's final results.Cunego is one of my favourite Italian riders (Pozzatolocks is clearly not included in that list),while Fuglsang is not just a Saxo Bank rider but he's also an ex-mountain biker and seems a very nice boy.Sanchez is a very good rider, while Mosquera is probably my favourite Spanish rider.

Regarding the GC,I'm a bit sorry about Basso.His team worked a lot for him (Zaugg was just great),but unfortunately he couldn't make the difference.

(Photo Afp)