Movistar Team keep showing their young talents. A debutant in the top tier, Spaniard Enrique Sanz, gave the telephone squad their 11th victory of the 2011 season after outsprinting the rest of the field in the evening sector of the 1st stage in the Vuelta a Madrid, a short 84km circuit race around Coslada.

The young rider hailing from Orkoien near Pamplona won convincingly at the mass sprint deciding the race, a finish which Sanz was already the team’s choice in the morning, well before the opening individual time trial, where Rui Costa claimed 2nd place behind the actual race leader Castroviejo (EUS). “He was confident on contesting the victory,” commented Movistar Team sports director Yvon Ledanois after the race. “All the team worked for him and I’m sure that this victory will give him more confidence in order to keep fighting for victories.“ The work by all the group to save Sanz’s energy in the opening kilometers -with Chente, Iván Gutiérrez, Herrada and Rui Costa on front of the field- and a perfect leadout on the sprint paid off, and the young man in Blue could celebrate in fury what was his first victory as pro cyclist.

“It’s obvious that this is a special victory, the one that opens the bottle,” recognised an elated Sanz just after the podium ceremony, “but we shouldn’t give it more relevance; the important thing is that this is my first season and I have to keep learning every day. The team played with the wind to help me out in the first kilometers and kept working hard in the final for the sprint. It was quite a complicated sprint, but we amanged to do well: I tried my sprint in the warm-up a couple of times, I knew where I had to start my sprint from, and even though the rest jumped from the left, I was faithful to my original plan and tried it from the right side, pushing until the end with courage to get the win. I had been doing good races lately, as well in Llodio and Rioja as in Romandie, but in general that’s what all team have done; we have a very strong overall level, and even though some people were saying we didn’t have a killer, I think we’ve got five or six of those!”