I meant last night after the stage….at the finish he said he wanted Sepp to win and would support him.
Combine that with the team meeting reported by Escape…
Just some interesting speculation…but fits the leadership fight scenario, too. JV laying down the law that this is his team and he will call the shots.
Speaking of the team meeting I thought Plugge’s pre-stage interview this morning was pretty interesting: https://youtu.be/cLe5PU3RohQ?si=94QYZocRDyRYLQxx
The Escape article was a good read, aligned to my thinking as well. I still don’t think Roglic is quite the villain some have made him out to be, but it’d be for the best if he were to go to another team and get the opportunity to give it his all in the last few years of his career. While the Succession drama at least kept it a little interesting, we don’t need to see Jumbo win all 3 GTs each year and him racing against QS, UAE, Jumbo would surely add another element of entertainment. I don’t think he’d win against Jonas, but it’d still be more interesting to see him try.
I hope he does go to another team….the more contenders in July, the better.
Can he beat Rog or Pog straight up? Not likely……but could he take advantage of a tactical situation and capitalize on it? Quite possibly.
Roglic held back on Stage 16 and was 1:30 down when he took off on Stage 17 with 2km to go. I don’t see him as a big villain in all this. The bigger problem from a “support Sepp” point of view was Vingegaard taking off on Stage 17. But it seems like a moot point now anyway.
I went from being pissed at JV to being pissed at Rog in the space of 24 hours….
I understand why JV went for the stage win, but how he did it caused problems. I’m hindsight now, and based on his comments re: supporting Sepp, it may just all be at face value…he did it to honor Van Hooydonck and not go after the GC.
Who knows….but as noted earlier, the good thing about all this controversy is that it made what was looking like a very dull week quire interesting.
It will be interesting to see what TJV does next year in the GTs. If Rog wants co-leadership at the Tour, who do they send to the Giro? #GCKuss? 
Would be fun to see Jonas, Rog and Pog at the Tour. Would Pog chase Rog or stay focused only on Jonas? Hopefully we get 21 days of good Remco then and maybe one of the young second-tier GC guys taking a step forward. I don’t mind TJV winning and Jonas will be tough to beat, but they need some competition. The drama at this Vuelta was all about how to slice the pie, but there was never any doubt after Stage 13 that it was TJV’s pie.
Either way, I bet Pog would let GC Kuss go in the break. We could have this all over again!
I don’t think we will see Jumbo plan for Kuss to be the GC rider as long as Jonas and Roglic are around and on form.
Tour GC riders don’t typically appear at the Giro. If Jonas and Rog both go to the Tour, who rides GC at the Giro for TJV?
The Giro route should be announced/presented next month.
Sepp seems to do OK in the cold being from Colorado, and if he actually worked on his TT (which he’s had no reason to) he’d probably be consistently decent at it. Better than most climbers except these 5-star GT men.
WVA and GC Kuss. Then they both go to the tour in support roles. A guy can dream, right?
Matteo Jorgensen?
The problem with the answer to that being Sepp is that he’s one of if not the single best luxury domestique in the world. He’s been key to multiple Jumbo GT wins and they still need someone in that role.
His ability to ride all 3 GTs this year is an outlier and I wouldn’t bet on it being repeatable, moreover if he raced for GC at Giro he likely would be much more fried for the Tour than riding in a support role. Both due to additional physical exertion, but more so do the additional mental and emotional pressure of being the leader.
I hope Sepp gets other shots in the future, but I think it would be a mistake for him to try and do a complete pivot to a GC rider.
I agree. #GCKuss is mostly a meme, but awesome that it’s looking good at this Vuelta. Sepp has done double GTs before, but never Giro-Tour prior to this year. Assuming Rog goes, half the team in France is Jonas-Rog-WVA-Sepp.
It would be fun to see Sepp in Italy next spring, but unlikely. I honestly have no idea who they will send but like the Matteo mention above.
It feels like Sepp’s success here is more an indication as to the field quality at this years Vuelta than a suggestion that he needs to be the next GC leader.
I wonder, as mentioned above, whether Jumbo would have been better off getting Jonas to win to avoid the conflict in the future/potential contract issues when Sepp is up for renewal
I don’t think Sepp’s market value changes much based on this result. Hopefully he gets a nice bonus from it. His value is as the best mountain domestique in the peloton. That’s still worth a lot and several teams would be interested in him regardless of the result of this race.
The problem is that Kuss established such a non-trivial gap so early. In a co-leadership situation, that establishes the sole leader (basically what G Thomas says in pre-stage interview): But what do you do when it’s not one of the pre-race co-leaders? Protecting him isn’t charity (not what you have said, but others have insinuated that).
He established a 1:45” gap over Jonas and Rog in stage 6 or 7. That’s your leader at that point forward. Rally around him. What makes it hard for JV is that it’s not supposed to be Kuss. And it wasn’t some 15” gap, so JV is in quite a predicament at that point.
Add to that the comparatively light GC field, as you say, and we saw this pretty novel situation unfold. Sepp will go back to being a great domesique I think.
For a second I was looking for a 2x setup in the picture as a sign Jonas didn’t care about the red jersey. 
