Vuelta a Espana 2019 preview: Race favourite Primoz Roglic can lay marker in Jumbo Visma's rivalry with Ineos

It’s still 10 months away, but next year’s Tour de France is already shaping into a wheel-to-wheel combat between the two most lavishly funded teams in cycling, Britain’s Team Ineos and Netherlands’ Jumbo-Visma. The Dutch team quietly announced the signing of their best home rider, Tom Dumoulin, this week dropping #HalloTom into a promotional video like they’d just walked past him in the street. His arrival may have been quiet – and he won’t actually wear Jumbo’s distinctive yellow until 2020 – but it has already made a noise across the sport, and Dave Brailsford and the rest of Ineos would have heard it loudest of all.

As well as being a widely popular rider, with a friendly grin and a jawline that must have required scaffolding to construct, Dumoulin is a time-trial master and a robotic climber with the ability to challenge Ineos’s cast of champions. His addition means Jumbo-Visma are now overflowing with talent, and the Vuelta a Espana, which begins on Saturday, presents a major opportunity to showcase their grand tour credentials against a depleted field.

Dumoulin won the 2017 Giro d’Italia and has been acquired with the specific task of winning another grand tour, but he joins a squad that already contains potential leaders like Steven Kruijswijk (third at this year’s Tour), the Kiwi George Bennett, and the 29-year-old who comes into the Vuelta as the favourite to win the red jersey, Primoz Roglic.

Roglic is a former junior world ski jump champion, which might explain why he descends mountains so fearlessly on a bike, and after finishing fourth at the 2018 Tour de France and third at the 2019 Giro d’Italia, the Slovenian is in no doubt about what he wants to achieve in his first Vuelta. “The podium is a nice place, but I’ve already done that at the Giro,” he said on Thursday. “I want to fight as hard as possible to win.”

He is likely to get off to a good start: the opening stage is a team time-trial around Torrevieja in the south-east of Spain, a discipline in which Jumbo-Visma have excelled recently, and he will get the chance to show his overall form on the steep summit finish of stage five. Roglic faces a number of potential rivals, like Astana’s Miguel Angel Lopez and Jakob Fuglsang as well as Movistar’s Nairo Quintana and world champion Alejandro Valverde, but other than Lopez the rest all have the labour of a Tour de France in their legs.

One rival he won’t have to face in Spain is Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz. The Movistar rider won the Giro earlier this year ahead of Roglic and is set to move to Ineos next year, so a battle with Roglic at the Vuelta would have made for an interesting preview of the Jumbo-Ineos rivalry in the months and years to come. But Carapaz suffered a fall last Sunday, doing “serious” damage to his shoulder according to Movistar, and he will not be racing.

All of which means there is no doubt who is the man to beat. The race itself presents a huge opportunity for Roglic; at 29 he is near his peak, and after skipping the Tour he should be in prime shape. The two riders who finished ahead of him at the Giro, Carapaz and Vincenzo Nibali, are not here, and the big hitters from Ineos like Geraint Thomas, Chris Froome and reigning Tour champion Egan Bernal are all resting or recuperating as a callow British team is led by the 24-year-old Londoner Tao Geoghegan Hart.

But it will also serve as something of a litmus test for Jumbo-Visma’s grand tour vision. Can they one day dismantle Ineos’s control in France? Can they build a team capable of fighting in the highest mountains? Can they lead a rider into the final week with the legs not just to follow Bernal or Froome but to blow them away? If Dumoulin is their grand-tour robot stored until next year, Roglic is the prototype who can lay down a marker in Spain over the next three weeks.