The day of glory of Enric Mas, the Mallorcan who has gone from being "a loser" to winning the Vuelta

BarcelonaEnric Mas has done it. "I have dreamed my whole life of winning like this," he said in Granada. At 31 years old, he has climbed to the top of the Vuelta a España podium in Granada. After years of dreaming of being able to win one of the three grand road cycling tours, the greatest triumph in the history of Mallorcan road cycling has arrived. If in track cycling the rider from Porreres, Joan Llaneras, broke all records with his four Olympic medals, in road cycling Enric Mas will be the benchmark from now on. "I have felt nerves, a day with a mixture of emotions, all positive. Now I must continue with what I am doing, I am already thinking about the next objectives. In sports, sometimes there is no time to enjoy the victories," explained the Mallorcan, who was accompanied by friends and family from Artà.

The Movistar rider had already successfully defended his lead in the general classification in Thursday's time trial, when he did not lose much time to the Slovenian Primoz Roglic (Decathlon), a four-time winner of the Vuelta. In the penultimate stage between La Calahorra and the Collado del Alguacil in Sierra Nevada, a leg-breaker with more than 4,600 meters of elevation gain, Mas defended his first position ahead of Roglic and the Austrian Felix Gall (Red Bull Bora). So the last stage, a bit chaotic since the riders did not look favorably upon the finish at the Alhambra, complaining to the organizers, was a stroll for Mas. A stage won by the Norwegian Tobias Johannessen (Uno X).

A small-town boy

Mas, married to the girl he was already dating when he was fifteen, has two children and is a reserved guy. Born in Artà in 1995 and the son of a doctor and a nurse, he had started cycling to play with his friends. They played basketball, did jumps on a skateboard, and cycled, like so many children. But when one of them joined the Artanenc Cycling Club, Enric also asked to join at 9 years old. And everything changed. There he was discovered by Miquel Alzamora, one of the best Spanish specialists in the Madison modality in track cycling, who won a world championship in 1997. It was he who proposed him to enter the Balearic School of Technification when he was fourteen, where he became the protégé of former rider Toni Colom. Back then it seemed he was destined like so many great Majorcan cyclists to ride in a velodrome, but Fran Contador, the brother of Alberto Contador, the two-time Tour winner, saw him in action and proposed he go train with his brother when he was nineteen.

At 21, Enric Mas debuted as a professional with the Klein Constantia team, a subsidiary of the Belgian Quick Step. And the first successes arrived, at the Tour of Alentejo and the Tour of Savoy. In one year he moved on to Deceuninck-Quick Step to debut in big races. "Enric puts a lot of pressure on himself. You have to learn to live like that. He is a very hardworking, methodical, self-sacrificing guy, who takes defeats badly. In terms of conditions, we are talking about a cyclist who could aspire to win races, but we cannot add too much pressure to him, he already pressures himself enough," explained Alberto Contador at the time, who acted as a mentor to a man who has great physical conditions to be a cyclist, such as a heart a little larger than the rest of the people. A good climber, Enric Mas jumped to the Movistar team, where he became the team leader at just 26 years old. The arrival at Movistar marked a before and after: he moved to reside in Andorra and became one of the great hopes of national cycling. Spain was orphaned of good cyclists in the era of Pogacar, Vingegaard and Roglic, a fact that pressured every good cyclist who showed their head, such as Mikel Landa and later Mas.

By 2018, he had already become the first Mallorcan to reach the Vuelta podium since 1948, when Bernat Capó, born in Muro, did so. And he did it by winning a stage, his first in a race where the last cyclist from the island to have achieved this was Antoni Vallori in 1976. And in 2021, he competed head-to-head with the Slovenian Primoz Roglic, the man he has finally surpassed this year in the general classification.

But since then, the great triumph he needed had not arrived. He has made four podiums at the Vuelta and on two occasions has finished in the top ten of the Tour, but without options to win. All the excitement he had begun to generate turned into criticism. His own team manager, Eusebio Unzué, went as far as to state in 2022 that Mas did not have "the stuff to lead." "The psychological block he suffers from is not normal. Simply put, he is not ready to carry the hopes of all Spanish cycling, he needs time and patience to mature.” That same year, a fan followed him during a stage of the Vuelta shouting at him that he was "a loser." In recent years, crashes have punished him time and again, and he has abandoned many races while being criticized for not being one of those who attacks on mountain stages. Mas, in fact, has admitted that he has worked with psychologists in order to try to compete better, to overcome the fear he had of high-speed descents.

And when few people expected to see him win, all the stars aligned. In this Vuelta, where everyone took it for granted that the best rider of the moment and who knows if of all time, the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar (UAE), would win, Mas was in second place after a great triumph on the ninth stage with a finish at the Serra d'Aitana. It seemed that finishing second would already be a success when Pogacar fell after hitting a rock on an unimportant stage. The Slovenian's withdrawal allowed Mas to be first, which he defended with success and his best cycling in years, a first position that also signifies the first triumph for a Spaniard at the Vuelta since Alberto Contador, one of Mas's mentors, in 2014.