“Mikel Landa descends on the birthplace of Landismo,” the headline dashed across the Marca on Thursday morning.

“Mikel, Mikel,” said a family in Athletic Bilbao jerseys when they first saw Landa, and the sea of Ikrina flags along the roadside fluttered with even more fervor as Landa passed this way to sign his name.

“It's a stage for the breakaway group,” Landa said upon arriving at the mixed zone. When Landa arrived at the mixed zone, he said, “Today is a stage for the breakaway group.

These words, unfortunately, were to be his fateful last words. The breakaway group had had a successful day, but now the battle for the overall was on. When Richard Carapas (EF Education-Easy Post) accelerated on the Puerto Herrera climb with just under 50km to go and stretched the peloton, Landa was surprisingly unable to follow.

The 10-meter gap quickly grew to 30 minutes. But as Calapaz and EF continued their offensive on the summit, Landa was separated by an irrevocable distance.

Casper Pedersen, who had been part of the early breakaway, was ordered by his team, renamed T-Rex Quick Step, to wait for Landa to pick up the pace. The gap to his rivals on the podium was widening. On the final run-in to Maestu, Landa had already settled into a large chase group, resigned to the fact that he would not win this Vuelta.

Landa arrived in Maestu 10 minutes behind stage winner Urco Berlade (Kernfarma) and, more importantly, 3:20 behind the podium contenders. In the overall Vuelta a España standings, he dropped from 5th to 10th overall. He is 5:38 away from the red jersey and more than 4 minutes away from the podium.

Regardless of the result, Landa is always willing to be interviewed at the finish line. For example, when he crashed at the foot of the blockhouse in 2017, ending his hopes for the Giro d'Italia, he began talking to journalists about the incident before the wheels came to a halt and before they could ask him any questions.

Such a major setback on his home road struck in a slightly different way. As he crossed the finish line, Landa grimly accepted a bottle from Soignier and soft-pedaled toward the team bus, ignoring the TV crew's pleas.

Landa's forlorn silence already said a lot, but his teammate Pedersen was asked to fill the gap as he arrived at the finish area a little late; EF Education-Easy Post asked James Shaw to help the Calapas offense and Owain Doule into the break, but Pedersen confirmed that his team was still in it for the stage win.

“I wanted to give Mattia Cattaneo a chance to go for the stage win,” Pedersen said. 'But sometimes you have bad days. Landa was struggling on the climbs and we had to change our plan to help him. In the end it was a bad situation for us and we couldn't change it.

“It was definitely a very difficult climb. But there are days when the legs are not in good shape. Some days the legs don't feel good, and that's just the way it is. They were certainly ready and really focused.

Perhaps it was to be expected that accumulated fatigue would take its toll as the toughest Vuelta entered its final day. Landa had already finished fifth overall in the Tour de France in July. 'The Tour leg was different. I'm not far from them, but I'm not close,” Landa said wryly earlier this week about his condition.

Within minutes of the finish, the Spanish media dove headfirst into a postmortem analysis. They harshly criticized the team's decision to send Pedersen, Cattaneo, and Mauri Vansevenan on the road on such a day, saying that a headless T-Rex had eaten up Mikel Landa's podium options.

Perhaps, but a day like this is always a possibility for Landa. Like Thibaut Pinot, his fragility is the essence of his popularity. Wins and losses are mere details; it is the emotion that is remembered. The crowd, gently applauding him as he finished the stage and headed for the bus, understood this well. Landismo gives, and landismo takes.

And of course, there is always a chance to dream again. Saturday, the final summit finish of the Vuelta is the Picón Blanco, which Landa won in the 2017 Vuelta a Burgos. At least in the birthplace of Landismo, the idea lives on.

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