"Aw mate, I don't think anyone's complaining that it's not 38 or 40°C every day," O'Connor smiled when he took a seat in the press conference truck in Baiona. "It's a beautiful region, and it's nice to see green again. It's good to be back in respectable weather. It was still 30°C at points today, but there's a big difference between 30°C and 40°C. At that point, you can never really cool down."
The snapshot provided by the final climb can sometimes offer a misleading overview of the day's racing. However, there was nothing deceptive about the picture painted by the Alto de Mougás on stage 10 of the Vuelta a España. In so far as possible in a race of this intensity, Ben O'Connor enjoyed a relatively comfortable day in the red jersey of race leader.
It helped, of course, that the Vuelta's long transfer north to Galicia brought with it a hefty drop in temperature. After the mercury had climbed above 40°C amid the parched terrain of Andalusia last week, the air was mercifully cooler as the peloton navigated the verdant peaks of the Rías Baixas on Tuesday - even if, like O'Connor's apparent ease on the final climb, it's all relative.
As ever when a Grand Tour resumes after a rest day, there was a blistering start to the action as the race left Ponteareas, but once stage winner Wout van Aert and the break had established themselves, there was a significant degree of cooling in the main peloton. The climbs of the Vilachán and the Mabia passed without any serious unrest in the bunch, and O'Connor's Decathlon-AG2R teammates policed affairs firmly for most of the category 1 Alto de Mougás to boot.
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