Sepp Kuss, Vuelta Winner (#283)

On Sunday, Sepp Kuss, an American cyclist, won the Vuelta a Espana (one of the three Grand Tours. The others are the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia.) An American had not won a Grand Tour since 2013. It is an very exciting time for American cycling.

Sepp Kuss

Sepp Kuss is a 29 year old American cyclist from Durango, Colorado. A graduate of the University of Colorado with a degree in advertising, he started off as a mountain bike rider and then evolved into a full time road cyclist. For most of the year he lives in Andorra, a tiny principality between France and Spain in the Pyrenees mountains, so he can live and train at altitude. He is married to Noemí Ferré, a former Spanish professional cyclist. They have a 6 month old poodle, Bimba, who is typically with Noemi at the end of every stage.

In cycling, Sepp Kuss is a super-domestique for the Jumbo-Visma Team. His role is to help the team’s leader win the race by pacing the leader up a climb, making it easier for the leader. Aerodynamics makes it about 10% easier to pedal a bike if you are following behind someone. Sepp is very good at his job — he helped Jonas Vingegaard with the Tour de France in 2022, Primoz Roglic win the Giro d’Italia in 2023, and Jonas Vingegaard win the Tour de France again in 2023. He is well-liked by the other cyclists in the peloton too.

Team Jumbo Visma

In 2023, the Jumbo-Visma Team had won the Giro d’Italia with Primoz Roglic and the Tour de France with Jonas Vingegaard. No team has ever won all three Grand Tours in a year. After the victory at the Tour in July, Jumbo set out to sweep the three Grand Tours. The Vuelta a Espana is a 21 day stage race over three weeks. There are flat stages, time trials, and mountain stages to challenge the riders.

The Managing Director of Team Jumbo-Visma is Richard Plugge. The American equivalent is the General Manager of a football or baseball team. At the beginning of the year, Primoz Roglic was selected by Plugge to race the Giro d’Italia (which he won) and the Vuelta a Espana (which he has previously won three times). He was clearly the leader for the team and planned his training around winning both Grand Tours.

However, Plugge wasn’t satisfied. At the end of the Tour de France, Jonas Vingegaard (the winner of the Tour de France 2022 and 2023) announced that he was also racing the Vuelta. So the Jumbo team went from one leader to two co-leaders for the Vuelta. Further complicating matters, Sepp Kuss announced that he was also racing the Vuelta which would be his third Grand Tour of the year. Riding all three Grand Tours is no easy task — since 1955 there have only been 47 riders who have ridden all three in a year. So three out of the 8 riders on Team Jumbo-Visma at the Vuelta had a possibility to win the race.

The Directeur Sportif (French for sporting director) for the Jumbo Team during the Vuelta was Marc Reef. A directeur sportif (DS) is the person directing a cycling team during a bicycle road race. It is seen as the equivalent to a field manager in baseball or a head coach in football. At professional level, a directeur sportif follows the cyclists in a car and communicates with riders, personnel and race officials by radio.

Fighting the Plan

The Army has a saying “Fight the enemy, not the plan.”

Jumbo-Visma entered the Vuelta with the plan that first Roglic or then Vingegaard would win the race for the team. DS Reef was committed to the plan to achieve that goal. The fight was envisioned to be between Team Jumbo-Visma and Team Soudal-Quick Step who featured Remco Evenepoel, the 2022 Vuelta a Espana winner. However, as we like to say in the Army “the enemy gets a vote.” In cycling the saying would be “the race course, the weather, or the riders get a vote.”

The Jumbo-Visma plan was fine through Stage 5. Remco Evenepoel was in the lead, but all three Jumbo riders (Sepp, Primoz, and Jonas) were less than a minute back. On Stage 6, a large breakaway got away which included Sepp Kuss and three Jumbo riders. Riding hard in the mountains all day, Sepp won the stage. He also ended up 8 seconds in the General Classification (GC) behind Lenny Martinez, a rider from Groupama-FDJ. Primoz and Jonas were almost 3 minutes behind Sepp in the GC. After six years of riding the race, it was Sepp’s second stage victory in the Vuelta. He celebrated by drinking a huge amount of champagne on the podium.

On Stage 8, another difficult mountain stage, Team Jumbo Visma set a hard pace which ended up with eight riders basically finishing together. Primoz, Jonas, and Sepp were all in the group. Martinez, the red jersey holder at this time, was dropped. With his results, Sepp took the red jersey as the General Classification leader (The leader of the Vuelta gets to wear a red jersey.) Primoz and Jonas were still over 2:30 behind.

Jumbo took a different tack as they kept fighting the plan. First, they waited until Stage 10, an individual time trial to see if Primoz or Jonas (who were regarded as better time trialists that Sepp) could take the red jersey. Sepp, however, didn’t get the message — he rode the time trial of his career and stayed 26 seconds ahead of Marc Soler (a rival from Team UAE), 1:36 ahead of Primoz, and 2:22 ahead of Jonas.

At this point in the race, Reed failed to understand that the environment had changed and kept fighting the plan. Most teams who would get a rider into the red jersey by stage 11 would immediately rally around the leader and do their darnedest to have him keep the lead for the remainder of the race. Jumbo, with three amazing riders, wanted to keep the ability to have Roglic or Vingegaard win the race. DS Reed failed to provide good leadership — he kept the ambiguity going by saying that the riders would fight it out on the road.

This lack of leadership from the DS and the desire to keep fighting the plan led to some weird stages, especially Stage 17 where Roglic and Vingegaard attacked Kuss in the final kilometers and dropped him. Luckily, Kuss rallied, caught Mikel Landa’s wheel (Landa races for Team Bahrain-Victorious) and only lost 19 seconds to his teammates — and kept the red jersey by 8 seconds ahead of Jonas Vingegaard.

Social media rallied to Sepp Kuss’s defense. The story of the loyal worker who had become the leader was fascinating to cycling and non-cycling fans alike. Pundits debated Jumbo-Visma’s lack of strategy. GC Kuss became a meme on a variety of social media platforms. The social media backlash made it more difficult for Jumbo-Visma to keep fighting the plan.

Finally on Stage 19, Team Jumbo-Visma stopped fighting the plan. Primoz and Jonas acknowledged that Kuss was the leader. Roglic and Vingegaard then rode in support of him for the rest of the race. In the end, after 1959 miles and almost 80 hours on the bikes, Sepp Kuss finished first, Jonas Vingegaard second (17 seconds behind), and Primoz Roglic third (1:08 behind Kuss) in the 2023 Vuelta a Espana. Team Jumbo Visma had completed its sweep of all three Grand Tours and went 1-2-3 in the Vuelta.

Sepp Kuss is the first American to win a Grand Tour since 2013 and the first person since Gastone Nencini in 1957 to have ridden all three Grand Tours and won one. As you can tell, I am a Sepp Kuss fan. Here are three previous articles I wrote about him:

Followership and the Domestique (#74)

Followership and the Vuelta 2021 (#156)

Sepp Kuss, American Cyclist (#283)

Conclusion

Do you and your team struggle to respond to a changing environment? Are you and your team continually fighting the plan when it has become overcome by events? Then reach out to me here and start the conversation about doing executive coaching or business consulting to take yourself or your team to the next level.

In the meantime, fight the enemy, not the plan and enjoy American cycling’s first Grand Tour winner in a decade, Sepp Kuss.