Vuelta a Espana predictions and cycling betting tips: Reigning champ Remco Evenepoel can serve it up to might of Jumbo-Visma

Where to watch the Vuelta a Espana

Stage one (team time-trial)
Eurosport 1, 6.05pm Saturday

Best bet

Remco Evenepoel to win the Vuelta a Espana
2pts 9-2 bet365

Vuelta a Espana predictions

The winners of the last four Grand Tours will be on the start line of this year's Vuelta a Espana, as well as two other former Tour de France winners, making for arguably the best three-week race of 2023.

Three-time Vuelta winner Primoz Roglic will be present for Jumbo-Visma, who also field Tour winner Jonas Vingegaard, as the Dutch superteam bid to become the first team to win all three Grand Tours in a single season.

The team are leaving no stone unturned in that pursuit and in Vingegaard they have the outstanding favourite.

However, the Tour-Vuelta double has been completed only once this millennium, by Chris Froome in 2017, and you have to go all the way back to Bernard Hinault in 1978 to find the time before that.

If on his Tour-winning form of July then Vingegaard has an outstanding change of bucking that trend. But he didn't take in the Vuelta after his first Tour win last year and his participation feels like something of an afterthought rather than a pre-planned target.

Roglic knows more than most what it takes to win this race and is preferred of the Jumbo duo, but at the prices Remco Evenepoel could prove to be the value selection in his attempt to retain the red jersey.

The Belgian is a special talent and while he doesn't have the collective firepower of Jumbo-Visma at his disposal, Evenepoel is an atuned racer who rarely ascribes to conventional wisdom.

Evenepoel's Giro was cut short when he tested positive for Covid after winning a second time-trial stage. And having been forced early to leave the Giro, which Roglic went on to win, Evenepoel has significantly less racing in his legs this year than some of his main rivals.

He has returned to action with third place at the Tour de Suisse and victories in the Belgian national championship, Clasica San Sebastian and, most recently, the world time-trial championship so his form is there.

The reigning champion will have to measure his efforts when the race reaches the mountain-top finishes it is famous for. But if he can do that, Evenepoel should be firmly in the mix again.

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