Oscar Rodriguez pulled off the biggest win of his career by snatching victory on stage 13 of the Vuelta a España, while his fellow Spaniard Jesús Herrada retained the red jersey but saw his lead significantly trimmed by Simon Yates.

The 23-year-old Rodriguez is riding his first grand tour and is out of contract with Euskadi-Murias. He made his mark by freeing himself from a small breakaway group in the final stretch of the summit of the La Camperona mountain, battling against gradients of 24%. Rodriguez finished 19 seconds ahead of Rafal Majka and half a minute clear of Dylan Teuns.

Herrada struggled in the mountains after going for broke in Thursday’s flat stage to lift the leader’s red jersey from Yates and his gap over the Briton was cut from 3min 32sec at the start of the stage to 1min 42sec.

Nairo Quintana finished the strongest of the general classification hopefuls to leapfrog his Movistar teammate Alejandro Valverde into third place, eight seconds behind Yates.

The stage was the first of three consecutive summit finishes which will put the general classification hopefuls to the test and is likely to have a huge say in who wins the race overall.

Saturday’s stage is a new, 171km mountain route containing five classified climbs and just shy of 3,000 metres of vertical climbing, while Sunday sees a visit to Lagos de Covadonga, an old favourite of the Vuelta.



