“We wanted to come here to see the race, but there was nothing to be done.” In these few words, Marie and Pierre, two of the dozens of spectators suddenly crammed into the Vuelta a España press room seeking refuge from a spectacularly intense rain and hailstorm, summed up theirs – and everybody else’s – predicament.
It was clear that, under these circumstances and with the Vuelta’s stage 3 cancelled due to the weather, larger questions like rider and spectator safety and wellbeing had abruptly become much more important than ‘just’ a bike race.
As the two French fans spoke to Cycling News, fans, journalists and race organisers, many in streaming wet clothes, tried to take stock of a room suddenly jammed to overflowing with people trying to regain their bearings and, above all, stay out of the worst of the weather. On some press tables, race photographers battled to clean and dry their equipment after it had been soaked by the downpour.
Next to them, race staff exchanged hurried phone calls and tried to find out what steps the Vuelta would take in weather conditions so severe it had caused an entire Grand Tour to grind to a halt.
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In another corner of the overflowing room, the mayor of Font Romeu, Alain Luneau, held a series of impromptu interviews with journalists, explaining what the local authorities could do and had done.
Outside, what was intended to be the finishing straight of stage 3, the massive hailstorm briefly turned the ground completely white, the skies darkened notably, and parts of the race infrastructure swayed dramatically in the gusting high winds.
“We just walked over from the village to see the race,” Marie and Pierre, a couple in their fifties, told Cycling News, as they looked out at the rain and hail lashing down on the Font Romeu ski station, a small collection of buildings on a mountainside more than five kilometres from the nearest village. “It seemed like a great opportunity as we were here on holiday. Nobody could have expected this to happen. It’s just real bad luck; who could have expected this sort of weather?”
Some 15 kilometres down the course, similar kinds of scenes were playing out on the race route. One previous major rainstorm had already abruptly caused a host of umbrellas to sprout amongst the several hundred people at the finish - but that hadn't affected the riders at all.
But the second rainstorm, just when Mats Wenzel (Kern Pharma) had attacked, then Lorenzo Fortunato (XDS-Astana) tried to bridge across, was another story altogether.
In the space of barely half an hour, conditions worsened dramatically, culminating with race leader Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) adopting the mantle of race patron and waving the entire peloton to a halt.
While riders crammed into a hotel, barely a quarter of an hour later, organisers decided that the race would be definitively halted, or as the official race communiqué said later: "The decision was taken due to a significant deterioration in weather conditions during the stage, including poor visibility, strong winds and icy road conditions. After consultation with the organisers, the President of the Commissaires Panel decided that the results of the intermediate sprint and the mountain sprint is cancelled."
The decision drew praise from Visma-Lease a Bike team management, who said, "It's been a good call from the riders and organisation to step off the bikes. It's the safest for everyone to cancel the race because the weather conditions were simply too dangerous to continue."
While nobody could really disagree with that, perhaps the most unsettling thing of all was the speed with which the weather had changed. It was true that storms had been forecast for the afternoon. But although the temperatures were a little lower at the start and it was noticeably colder in the mountains than on the coast, such an abrupt and dramatic worsening in weather conditions could hardly have been predicted.
"The weather here often changes very fast in the second half of August," three local residents, given a lift down the rain-soaked mountain by Cycling News long after the stage had finished, pointed out, "But on this level was something nobody could have foreseen" - certainly not to the point where a race needed to be cancelled in the middle of summer.
It shouldn't be forgotten that back in 2013, the Vuelta's stage 14 began in 30 degrees and warm sunshine on the coast, but by the time it reached Andorra, temperatures had plummeted to just five degrees as hail and freezing rain battered the race. That day, 16 riders abandoned, some, like Haimar Zubeldia and Luis León Sanchez, because of hypothermia.
It's not the first time Tadej Pogacar has acted as patron and done what he could to stop a race because of bad weather: He took on a similar role in the Tre Valli Varesine back in 2024 when there was a huge rainstorm, and the event was suspended some 100 kilometres from the finish.
However, the switch in weather conditions on stage 3 of the Vuelta was far more serious than anticipated. Certainly not by any of the bedraggled spectators crammed in the Vuelta press room, and watching as a long line of team buses ground through the finish, heading to pick up the riders and take them to their hotels in Andorra, a good 90-minute drive away.
Given the good weather earlier in the day, some fans like Pierre and Marie had walked up the five kilometres from the village of Font Romeu to the ski station above where the finish took place, while others had used the ski lift, running free of charge for the bike race. But lightning hit the lift and became unusable almost as soon as the rain began, forcing the local authorities to later send up buses to try and rescue the stranded spectators.
These, however, took a long time to arrive as the torrential rain, clean-up operations and removal of the race infrastructure all combined to produce some small but very complex traffic jams around the finish area, long after the riders were in their buses and as the hail had morphed back into rain.
Yet little else could really have been done. "We have seen hail like this in the past," the mayor, Alain Luneau, told reporters including Cycling News. "It's really a complicated situation for everybody, but definitely it was best to stop the race. It was the only choice possible given the circumstances. We talked it through with the organisers.
"This is stage 3 of the race; riders could have been injured. That would not have been at all good. So this is the best choice to take.
"But I do think the race will come back and we will have another stage here one day."
Meanwhile, the weather itself is supposed to return to a much more normal 20 degrees and sunshine on Tuesday, with no rain forecast for the high-altitude mountain stage in Andorra. And many of the fans, including Pierre and Marie, have promised they will head there - and hopefully, this time, the weather won't take such a dramatic turn for the worse.
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