By Pierre Menjot (L’Equipe)
Long seen as the heir to Alberto Contador and then heavily criticised for his style and a curious lack of results, Movistar’s Enric Mas made peace with his destiny – and his fans – by becoming the first Spanish winner of the Vuelta a España since Contador in 2014.
The signs bearing his name sprang up on the roadside during the final weekend of the 2026 Vuelta a España and Enric Mas almost took the time to read them one by one. “The encouragement of an entire country, it’s very pleasant,” noted the 31-year-old who had worn the red leader’s jersey since the start of stage nine.
It was a lead inherited in a manner no rider takes pleasure in. The former race leader, the dominant rider of the opening week Tadej Pogačar, crashed out a day earlier and the deficit of 3:50 that Mas needed to make up if he was to challenge the Slovenian for victory a fortnight later was wiped out in an instant. The Spaniard was elevated up the GC standings from second place to race leader.
When the Vuelta concluded in Granada on Sunday Mas was still clad in red, as he had been for a couple of weeks. His advantage over the rider in second place – another Slovenian, the four-time Vuelta champion Primoz Roglič – was 2:15.
The relief was palpable. Mas can savour success. At last. He hasn’t had much of it in recent years, until this blessed summer “which allows people to see Enric in a different way now,” notes his compatriot David de la Cruz. The two have been team-mates in the past. This year they were on rival teams but the Catalan’s respect for the Mallorcan’s accomplishment was obvious. He was not the only rider impressed by Mas this September.
“He’s one of the riders who has received the most criticism among those I know,” says another former team-mate, Frenchman Rémi Cavagna. The rider from Clermont met the young Enric 10 years ago, within the Klein-Constantia team, the development squad for the so-called ‘Wolfpack’ (ie. Quickstep which, in 2017, would become the first WorldTour team that Mas and Cavagna would race with).
When it was time for him to compete in the top-tier, Mas opted for an exile of sorts, stepping out of his comfort zone “to learn another kind of cycling in Belgium,” as he told L’Equipe in 2022. During his formative years, the climber from Mallorca insisted he had “good results at 20, 21, but not top level like Alejandro (Valverde) or ‘Purito’ (Joaquim Rodriguez). I had to improve little by little.”
“I met Enric in 2017 at Quickstep when he was a rider with a high level of confidence,” says Cavagna before noting a change in attitude. “Still, I never saw that ease, that lightness, again.”
Confidence was replaced by pressure, especially after his breakout performance at the 2018 Vuelta when, at 23, Mas finished second on GC behind Simon Yates. That result in his second Grand Tour would rapidly accelerate expectations.
One year after Alberto Contador’s retirement Mas seemed like the obvious successor, certainly for the Grand Tours. Spanish fans and media alike believed the run of victories would continue, El Pistolero was finishing but another climber was rising up the rankings. But the rider Cavagna describes as “a simple, great guy, always cracking a little joke in the peloton” was not ready for that.
“As a Spanish cyclist, and even more so in a Spanish team (he joined Movistar in 2020), it’s for better or for worse,” sums up De la Cruz, himself once seen as a star of the future. “It’s part of the deal, being at the centre of attention.”
Another rider delighted to talk about “a truly great rider and a great team-mate,” is Sergio Samitier, now at Cofidis, felt this weight of expectation bearing down on Mas’s slender shoulders. “He’s always been under a lot of pressure,” said Samitier on Sunday. “But it’s difficult to make people like a way of racing that’s a bit different from Contador’s.
‘El Pistolero’ attacked out of the saddle. ‘Enriqueta’, on the other hand, was often labelled as a wheel-sucker. “When I didn’t attack, it was because I couldn’t, not because I didn’t want to,” he argued in 2022. “I also lacked self-confidence.”
But in 2026 Spain has another Grand Tour champion, one who will now surely ride with a renewed sense of purpose… and perhaps even a greater degree of confidence in his ability. After having finished on the Vuelta’s GC podium four times – second in 2018, 2021, and 2022; third in 2024 – Mas is now a winner.
Mas in Granada, in red and in glory
“He was the first to think he could do better than what he was achieving,” reflects the long-time manager of the Movistar Team, Eusebio Unzue. “But there was always one thing or another… there was a period of fear he went through after his crash on a descent during the 2022 Dauphiné, or the Tour de France – the big race everyone wants to ride but from which it’s hard to emerge satisfied, and where he undoubtedly suffered more than his rivals before doubling up with the Vuelta… all that had a slight negative influence on his development.”
Before his Vuelta victory there were plenty of winning achievements: the other podium finishes in the Spanish Grand Tour, the Tour of Guangxi (the end-of-season WorldTour racing in China which Mas won in 2019), victory at the 2022 Giro dell’Emilia ahead of Tadej Pogačar, before taking second behind the Slovenian at Il Lombardia a week later…
He has built a fine palmarès, albeit lean in terms of actual wins (with only six victories achieved in the 13 years on the WorldTour before this summer). “But people kept saying he raced defensively, that he didn’t have the level to win a Grand Tour,” sighs Cavagna. “Except there were riders better than him in the mountains and he wasn’t the best in time trials. But he’s a grafter, I often saw him at training camps on his time trial bike.”
He might be a hard worker who is respected by fellow cyclists but his limited charisma doesn’t necessarily help boost his popularity. When success is achieved, however, the rewards extend beyond the race itself, bolstering confidence and eliminating doubt. “Me? I’m happy when I get a good result,” he explains. “Winning is something for the team rather than my personal ego… they will be happier and work even more for a leader who wins.”
On the second Sunday of September 2026, he was the chosen one clad in red, racing on the streets of Granada where he sealed his overall triumph while the Norwegian Tobias Halland Johannessen (of the UNO-X Mobility team) took the stage win.
Without Tadej Pogačar’s crash and withdrawal, he probably wouldn’t have been in a winning position, but Mas had already proved he was on another level, even when the Slovenian was stomping his authority on the Vuelta.
Mas was capable of hauling back the attacking by Pogačar at Castelló de la Plana (stage 6). That statement already lifted his esteem. Once the crash heralded a change of GC leadership, he seized the chance of a lifetime. And yet there was no sense of revenge, a subject he has often been asked about. “He will silence some detractors but, when I speak with him, he never talks about [revenge],” says Samitier. “He never complained, and I never saw him on social networks checking what people were saying about him.
“He rises above the criticism,” grins Samitier in summary, “and after this Vuelta he will have a beautiful palmarès, right?”
“Enric has an inner peace and a lot of confidence, and all that coincides with a wealth of experience accumulated and the reality of him coming back from all these past dramas,” Unzue says about the latest of his team’s Grand Tour winners. “Today he is a happy man who is enjoying himself because it’s something he would have liked to experience for years.”
“Cycling will be fair to him,” Alberto Contador said yesterday morning in a feature published in the Spanish newspaper AS. A few days earlier Mas offered some comments on his Vuelta-winning predecessor: “He was my hero since I was young – he used to win everything!” Mas may not “win everything”, but since this Sunday he truly is the heir Spanish cycling has been waiting for.
– By Pierre Menjot (L’Equipe)
Complete results of the 81st Vuelta a España (22 August–13 September 2026)
