“I'm going to see some people explode, and I hope one of them isn't me,” was Ben O'Connor's sentiment ahead of Tuesday's first summit finish of the Vuelta a España, Pico Vilhuelcas.

The three Grand Tours this year, the Giro d'Italia with a summit finish on Mount Oropa and the Tour de France with a summit finish on Mount Galibier, all have a big climb in the first week, and stage winner Tadej Pogachar (UAE Team Emirates) won the overall

Pogachar's dominance may have been case by case in these first week mountain stages, as it has been in all other stages this season. But the leader of Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale is convinced that Villehercas “will have a pretty big impact.”

He assures us, however, that he will not repeat his general attack on the lead group, as Pogachar did.

“It's a completely different climb than Oropa,” he told Cycling News, “Viluelcas is very steep, so I'll ride at the pace I can.

“Oropa was totally different, it was faster and Poggi set the pace. O'Connor therefore agreed to concentrate on his own performance rather than following the others and to get through the climb in the best possible condition.

The Vuelta a España stage finished in 2021 with a climb up Vilhuelcas, but apart from the last few kilometers, most of it was another approach road coming up from the south, up the town near Guadalupe. This time, we tackle Viluelcas from the north. Somewhat confusingly, the hardest sub section of Vilhuelcas used by the Vuelta this August is known as Alto Collado de Ballesteros (2.9 km, 13.4%) and was included in the 2021 route as an independent climb in the middle of the stage.

“The heat will have a pretty big impact, it's going to be close to 40 degrees and it's almost 3km at 13 or 14%,” O'Connor told a small group of reporters at the start of stage 3.

“You can't move fast and it's going to be super, super hot, which could create some pretty big gaps.

“You can come in relatively fresh, so there's no fatigue building up. But when the temperature is around 40 degrees all day, that doesn't matter. Hopefully one of them won't be me.”

O'Connor, who is currently 55 seconds behind race leader Wout Van Aert (Vimalies a Bike), admits to being a fan of these hard stages in the first week of the Grand Tour and being part of the first two days of racing He says that because the 2024 Vuelta a España has the most vertical climbs of any Grand Tour over the past 20 years, “there should be a little more balance between sprint stages and intermediate mountain stages.”

For something as hard as the Vuelta's Vil Elkas climb, he says, it's more a matter of simplicity than a strategic stage.

“If it's steep, it's not a climb you'd actually attack anyway,” he explains. 'It's more about watts per kilometer, or pure power and weight setup.' But whatever the physiological explanation for what happens in Vil Elkas, he says, “I think it's going to be a very interesting climb,” he adds, “and I think it's going to be a good one. A lot of things will happen tomorrow.”