The breakaway is dead. Long live the breakaway.

Cor Vos

The story of the breakaway is a tale as old as cycling itself. Rider attacks. Rider dreams of glory. And if all goes as planned and hoped: Rider defies the odds and the competition to achieve glory.

It's the story of the underdog outsmarting, or outriding, teams with more horsepower than herself. Over the years, stage races are where the breakaway gets its big break. Sometimes, rarely, a one-day event ends in an upset, and the break steals the show, but where the escape artists can really dream is during a multi-day event.

At this year's La Vuelta Femenina, two stages could be singled out as potential opportunities for those who can't win in a sprint or atop a long climb, those in-between riders, riders of teams without a big GC favourite, aka the rudderless domestiques.

One domestique who tried to take a stage from the break, but was caught with 2.5 km remaining, was Lauretta Hanson of Lidl-Trek.

"This Vuelta has been particularly hard and particularly frustrating for the breakaway," Hanson said ahead of stage 6. "There have been some really good attempts, and it was really fun to be a part of it on stage 4 – hard to come so heartbreakingly close – but it really seems here that the breakaway is getting harder and harder to really stick and make it to the line in races these days."

For Hanson, Lidl-Trek's overall goals were scrapped when Riejanne Markus, who has finished second and fourth overall at the Vuelta in the past, went down on day one and lost nearly six minutes. With its GC hopes gone, the strategy for the German team turned to stage-hunting. So at the start of stage 4, a stage that, on paper, looked good for a break, Hanson slipped into the move.

"Here at the Vuelta, I think it's because the last two days are the big GC days, and there aren't many opportunities to make big differences in some of these earlier stages. They are really hard, climbing stages, but we are still coming to the line with a big bunch."

What constitutes a breakaway stage? The criteria is somewhat simple, and like all areas of cycling, it involves a lot of luck.

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