2023 Vuelta a España Stage 11 Results & Recap
Stage 11 of the 2023 Vuelta a España is in the books. The final results and standings are below, followed by our recap of how the race unfolded.
Race Recap
Herrada wins atop La Laguna Negra
Cofidis's Jesus Herrada won stage 11 of La Vuelta on the slopes up La Laguna Negra after a well-timed attack out of what was left out of the break of the day on the final climb. The young Romain Grégoire (Groupama-FDJ) came second and Andreas Kron (Lotto Dstny) finished third.
"You can’t know when you’ll get your opportunity. You try, you try… And sometimes it works out," Herrada said. "I knew it was a good finale for me and it was gonna be very hard to be in the break. After many efforts, I was up there. It was a big breakaway so it was hard to make it work in the end with riders like Geraint Thomas, the FDJ… I felt good at the end. I saved my sprint until the last 300 metres and I did it. I can’t be happier than this. The goal was to win a stage. We had to wait for the second week. But now we’ve achieved a goal, we’ll enjoy and keep fighting! My father was here at the start and at the finish. I’m happy to have my relatives close to me and this is for them and also for those who couldn’t be there.
"Leading the KOM standings came as a secondary prize because of the victory," Herrada said. "I scored points on the other days, and with this victory we've got the jersey. At least tomorrow we'll keep it, and then in the Pyrenees it's going to be very difficult. I think it's going to be for the general classification and pure climbers. We'll fight for sure. The truth is that we got off to a bad start with the crash of Bryan [Coquard] and it took us a while to get back into the rhythm, and now that we've achieved one of our objectives, we have to keep fighting."
The GC remains the same after today, with Sepp Kuss leading the malliot rojo ahead of Marc Soler (UAD) by 23 seconds. Evenepoel is third at 1:09.
"It was quite a nice day I think," Kuss said. "It took a while for the breakaway to go. It was a big group. We were happy to let it go for the stage win and to ride the last climb defensively. Either way, if we had ridden it faster or slower, I think it would have been a sprint in the end like we saw today. I think we’re happy with today. I think everybody was looking at each other a bit and it’s a climb where you need to invest a lot in order to have differences in the end. There were some attacks from guys a bit further down on GC."\n
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