"I had been a zombie cycling from A to B for a few days, too proud to get off" - Jan Maas on finishing his first grand tour despite numerous injuries

Jan Maas started the Vuelta a España with big ambitions. However, things did not go too well for the 27-year-old Dutchman from Jayco-AlUla in the three-week stage race, as he continued to struggle with injuries he sustained in various falls.

In an interview with Algemeen Dagblad more than one week after the Vuelta, Maas indicates that he had to deal with a number of problems since the team time trial in Barcelona. "This year everything was all about my first grand tour. And in the first stage there were five of us on the ground. I was left with a scraped knee and a bruised hip. I knew I had to keep calm for the first two weeks, so that I would still have something left in week three," he followed advice from veterans such as Wout Poels and Dylan van Baarle. "I know those guys well now, they have a lot of experience and if you are chatting in the peloton, they give advice. That is beautiful."

Ultimately, it was stage eleven that Maas, who occasionally trains with Mathieu van der Poel, chose as the stage to attack. And so it happened: Maas was in the early breakaway and eventually finished the stage to La Laguna Negra won by Jesús Herrada in fourteenth. "That was nice, it promised a lot for the last week and a half. I could show what I had in me." However, it all turned out differently for Maas, who fell as a result of unbridled hecticism in the opening phase of stage thirteen. "A few guys in front of me missed the corner and I had no choice but to ride into them. I hit my ribcage and my head against a wall," he remembers.

Maas proves to be resilient and combative and manages to reach Madrid despite a lung and respiratory infection and a broken rib. "I felt that everything was no longer possible, but I had to make it to Madrid. I couldn't really do anything anymore. I had been a zombie cycling from A to B for a few days, too proud to get off. I felt like a 90-year-old man when I got out of bed, but I just wanted to reach the finish in Madrid on my first grand tour. The team offered to examinate me, but I didn't want to hear about it. Then maybe they would have sent me home. I wanted to continue myself."