Caída, caída! ”- fall, fall.

That was one of the most heard words recently at the Vuelta.

In terms of early falls, the Tour of Spain is hardly inferior to the other major tours of this season.

One team got through the first few days relatively well, namely the Movistar team.

It is true that one of the three captains, Miguel Ángel López, went down on the fifth stage.

The Colombian lost no time.

And Movistar has two other captains, the supposedly indestructible Alejandro Valverde and the increasingly solid driving Enric Mas.

In the overall standings, the trio is within striking distance of top favorite Primoz Roglic from Slovenia, who took back the red jersey on Thursday as second behind Magnus Cort Nielsen and clearly ahead of the other "gang of three" from the higher-rated team Ineos.

This team started with Egan Bernal, Olympic champion Richard Carapaz and Adam Yates.

However, Yates and Carapaz were already losing time.

Only Bernal looks like a true leader.

However, the Colombian claims: “It's good that we still have a lot of options.

We should be careful that as many of us are as far ahead as possible in the classification. "

Once even mocked

As with the Tour de France, the once so powerful Ineos block looks very fragile. In the case of minor problems, it begins to splinter, so to speak. The Movistar team makes a more compact impression. The fact that the multi-captain strategy has been practiced for a long time at the Spanish racing team seems to be paying off. In 2018 they traveled to the tour with Nairo Quintana, Mikel Landa and Valverde. Background: Minimizing the risk of being left without a captain after a collision. At least that worked. All three even came through, Landa finished seventh, Quintana tenth and Valverde fourteenth. However, the interaction had weaknesses. Movistar, the most traditional racing team in the peloton, even earned ridicule for it.

"Our problem was that we had overlapping goals," said Landa after the 2019 tour, where the scenario from the previous year was repeated. The trio even finished sixth, eighth and nine. Nevertheless, the Basque Landa, exasperated, ran away. The Movistar trio was never able to seriously compete for a podium position. Quintana too had had enough of the division of management tasks and even switched to the second division of cycling.

Only Valverde remained loyal to Movistar. Despite his advanced age, his level always remained so high that he could hardly be fobbed off with just a helper role. But Valverde wasn't good enough to seriously aim for a tour win either. His only Grand Tour victory was in autumn 2009. In this dilemma of not being able to make a complete decision for him, but also not against him, the Movistar management team stubbornly stuck to the multi-captain solution season after season. Only the names changed - only Valverde was a constant. In the place of Quintana and Landa came Marc Soler, later Mas and finally López. The latter two also contested the Tour de France 2021 together with Valverde. López was eliminated after a fall, Mas finished sixth, Valverde arrived in Paris in twenty-fourth.

At this Vuelta, the 41-year-old professional cyclist wants to concentrate on stage wins.

Mas has bigger ambitions.

“I come here to win this Vuelta.

I know I can do it, ”he said.

And López, who in his youth was not intimidated by wheel thieves armed with knives and who approached viewers who brought him down as a professional, has an almost insatiable thirst for victory anyway.

It is therefore quite possible that the three-way model will now work and that a balance will be achieved.

This would also cause the Movistar team to attract attention.

And critics refute such as those from the Jumbo-Visma team, from whom we have already heard: "No, we don't do it like Movistar."

Racing teams whose leaders can now write off larger goals after falling, such as DSM with Romain Bardet or the Bora-hansgrohe team with Maximilian Schachmann, may in future also rely on risk diversification. The big question, however, is: who does the hard work with so many chiefs? Perhaps the Movistar team will offer an answer to that as well.