In some ways, we’ve been here before. When Sepp Kuss rolls down the start line of the Monaco time trial on Saturday in the Vuelta a España, just like in 2023, the Visma-Lease a Bike racer will be tackling his third Grand Tour of the season.

The crunch question being: will Kuss be aiming to do what he did in 2023 and end up going for the overall win in the Vuelta, too?

After two 13th-place finishes at the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France this season, as well as a stage win in the Giro, when he talks about the Vuelta, the American invariably underlines that the key to any kind of successful third Grand Tour participation is always motivation.

But as Kuss also said at the Vuelta a España team presentation in Monaco on Thursday evening, rather than set a GC goal as a priority from the word go, he’s going to look at where he’s standing overall at the end of what is a very mountainous first week, and take it from there.

“We’ll see after the first week. For me, the main thing is to win a stage, but we’ll get into the race, then see how it’s going,” Kuss told Cyclingnews.

“There are so many mountain stages, so many potential breakaway stages, that you never know what can happen. So in the first week, we’ll take it one day at a time and see how it goes. The main things are the feelings, and I am feeling good and mentally motivated, and that is what is most important.”

Rather than ruling it out completely, then, Kuss simply gives the impression that he’ll let the race decide for itself. As he put it to Cyclingnews, “You never know.”

Certainly, he makes it clear that if it’s a question of priorities, right now going for a top 10 position overall – in contrast to going for the highest places overall – has less appeal than going for a stage win.

“A stage would make this a great Vuelta. A position in the top 10 to me isn’t so important,” Kuss added in another interview with a small group of reporters. “But after the first half, we’ll see how we’re going as the team, what position we’re at in the overall, and maybe look at other options depending on that.”

Kuss’s attitude of not getting too far ahead of himself was exactly the type of strategy that brought such rich rewards in the 2023 Vuelta, of course, when he got into a break en route to Javalambre in the first week and then found himself very close to the top of GC after winning the stage.

At the same time, given Visma-Lease a Bike have so many options for stage wins with riders like Wout van Aert and Matthew Brennan – to name but two of his best-known teammates – three years on, by not laying his cards on the table, Kuss is also allowing for lots of different scenarios to play out, both for himself and for his team.

“I’m feeling good. The truth is I always come to the Vuelta feeling motivated, and that’s very important,” he said. “You have to be on it mentally, because it’s going to be a very hard Vuelta, right from the start. We have lots of options to look for stages, so we’ll see how the riders are doing. We have a very well-balanced team.”

Stage hunting with Van Aert and Brennan

Speaking of his two standout teammates who will be looking for stage wins, the American said that Van Aert, recently a winner of the Tour of Denmark, “is in great form. It’s going to be a big fight with Pedersen and Pogačar if he wants the points jersey.

But he’s particularly keen after what happened before in the Vuelta, too” – a reference to the 2024 race, when a previously all-conquering Van Aert crashed out and was badly injured whilst leading both the points and the mountains competitions.

As for Brennan, taking part in his first Grand Tour, Kuss says that he’s particularly impressed by the young British racer’s ability to take almost everything that professional cycling has thrown at him in his stride, without losing his nerve.

“He’s always super calm,” Kuss told Cyclingnews. “It’s different because he’s such a good rider; that’s not the same as a guy that doesn’t know his capabilities starting a Grand Tour.

“It’s different, too, for a sprinter, because it’s such a hard race this year and he has to get through in the mountains. That’ll be the main thing for him. But I can see that he’s super calm and confident. He knows what he can do in these fast finishes. He’s such a good rider.”

Most of the few sprinters present in the Vuelta estimate there will be just five or six sprints at most, compared to eight possible sprint stages in the Tour. But Kuss argues that the hillier terrain – which Brennan has already shown he can handle well before an actual bunch sprint, both in races like the Tour de Pologne and the Volta a Catalunya – will benefit the 21-year-old.

“The climbs take the edge off the sprint stage. If you have just the pan-flat stages where everybody’s full of energy, then the sprints can be more chaotic,” Kuss points out. “We don’t have the lead-outs for that in our team, either, so I think that Vuelta-style sprints will be good for him.”

As for which stages will be good for Sepp Kuss, the American points to stage 4 in Andorra – where he won a mountainous trek in the Tour back in 2021 – as one possible target, given he’s racing on home soil there and knows the roads extremely well. But further down the line there are plenty of other options, too, which could favour him even more.

“The stage to Andorra would be very nice, but I’m not sure if it’s ideal, even if it’s always nice to race there,” he said. “But the ones that are in the third week with those very long climbs will be very good, and stage 9 in Alicante” – to the first-category Alto de Aitana, last tackled in 2016 – “is also good.”

By which point, too, Kuss will have a much better idea about a possible Vuelta GC bid and what his options are. But whatever happens in that regard, for a born climber like Kuss, any chances to shine in the mountains – and there are plenty of those in this year’s Vuelta – are always too good to miss.

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