George Hincapie, a regular collaborator of Lance Armstrong, could not understand how Soudal Quick-Step could have let 40 riders get away, including several Jumbo riders, giving Sepp Kuss an advantage over the rest in the classification.
"It's a good time," commented Lance Armstrong on Kuss' more than 2-minute lead over Evenepoel and the rest of the favourites.
"We might think he's going to lose two minutes or two and a half minutes, although we've never seen him go full throttle in a flat time trial," Bruyneel said of Kuss' possible performance. "I think he's going to lose the time, but he's going to stay up and he's shown he's in better shape than he was in the Giro and the Tour, that's meant that so far neither Roglic nor Vingegaard have had to attack and they've passed the toast to
Remco Evenepoel and the UAE and Movistar guys. I think only a great Remco can beat Jumbo in this Vuelta, I don't think Mas and Ayuso can".
Lance Armstrong confessed to being more than impressed with Kuss' performance: "It's incredible to be in this position doing three grand tours, I never wanted to do 2 in the same year, I only did 2 once because they gave me a lot of money to ride in Italy, but I was zero interested in doing more than one, I remember us talking about if I was going to do them all and we said it was 'incredible', it's amazing what he's doing."