According to market specialist Daniel Benson, Nairo Quintana will remain with Movistar Team for another season. The Colombian returned to the team this year after being disowned by half the peloton following his positive for tramadol at the 2022 Tour de France and, after completing a good Giro d’Italia, getting into breakaways and coming close to a stage win, it looks like he will remain with the Spanish team for at least one more year.
The Cómbita native is currently preparing for the Vuelta a España, in which he will be one of the most recognizable faces from August 17. He will share the lead in the race with Enric Mas, who did not have a good feeling in the general classification at the Tour de France.
Legendary numbers
At 34 years old Nairo is far from being the man who fought Chris Froome a couple of Tour de France and won the Giro d’Italia or the Vuelta a España, although in the Giro he showed that he still has the legs to fight for big stages and we will see in this Vuelta if he still has the legs to finish in the Top 10 of a big stage race.
This season he has not been lucky. He started his year at the Tour Colombia finishing 21st overall. Then he tested positive for COVID, which made him start his European season late.
He was present in the Volta a Catalunya, where he suffered a crash in the seventh stage that meant he could not race anything else until the Giro. There he struggled to find form, although he came close to winning stage 15 in Livigno, where only Tadej Pogacar was able to beat him in a high mountain stage. His bad luck with crashes continued in the Tour of Switzerland, where he again crashed and had to abandon in the third stage. We’ll see how fit he is for the Vuelta.
Source: www.ciclismoaldia.es