Landismo

The Season That Nearly Wasn't

Mikel Landa's 2026 began the way too many of his seasons have — with his body on the tarmac. At the Itzulia Basque Country in April, on the descent of San Miguel de Aralar, a race medical car struck him from behind. He finished the stage. He shouldn't have. By the next morning the pain was impossible to ride through. Scans revealed what the adrenaline had masked: a fractured pelvis.

The Giro d'Italia — the race he'd targeted as his spring centrepiece — was gone. The Tour de France fell away after it. For a 36-year-old in the final act of his career, the months that followed were the hardest of his life.

"I haven't even enjoyed any training this year, it's been that bad." Mikel Landa, pre-Vuelta interview

This was not the first time. At the 2025 Giro, Landa crashed on the opening stage and fractured a vertebra. Before that, the 2021 Giro — a broken collarbone and multiple ribs on Stage 5. The litany of what-ifs written across Landa's skeleton could fill a medical textbook. And yet, each time, the Basque climber has hauled himself back to the start line.

Stage 20: La Calahorra to Collado del Alguacil

The penultimate mountain stage. The queen stage. Five classified climbs crammed into 186.8 kilometres through the Sierra Nevada, finishing atop the Collado del Alguacil — a brute of a summit rated Hors Catégorie. Eight and a half kilometres at 9.8%. The kind of road where only mountain goats survive.

Landa infiltrated a large breakaway early — the kind of move an experienced rider makes when he knows the GC battle behind will let it go. The break swelled and fractured over the day's earlier climbs: the Puerto de Los Blancares, the two ascents of El Purche, the Puerto del Duque. By the foot of the Alguacil, the group was whittled down. Tobias Johannessen of Uno-X Mobility was there. So was the young Belgian Ramses Debruyne of Alpecin-Premier Tech.

And so was Landa.

A Life in the Mountains

To understand what this stage meant, you have to understand the arc. Mikel Landa Meana was born in Murgia, a village in the Basque heartland of Álava, on 13 December 1989. After two seasons with the Continental squad Orbea, he joined Euskaltel-Euskadi — the Basque team, the people's team — in 2011. It was there that the world first noticed what he could do on a climb.

Seven professional teams across seventeen years, five of them at WorldTour level. Two Grand Tour podiums at the Giro d'Italia. A mountains classification. And the perpetual question that has defined Landismo more than any result: what if?

What if Roglič hadn't overhauled him in that final Verona time trial? What if the 2021 Giro crash hadn't happened? What if a race car hadn't hit him in April? The parallel Landa — the one who stayed upright — might have a Grand Tour title. The real Landa has something no title can confer: a devoted following that has watched him suffer and come back, suffer and come back, for the better part of a decade.