Wow, what a race that turned out to be.

The quality of the racing was that good that over the course of the 3 weeks my missus went from playing with her phone while it was on in the background to eagerly watching every stage and even staying up later than usual to watch the highlights of yesterday evening's time trial. Bearing in mind that for all the years we've lived together she's tutted & moaned everytime cycling has been on I never thought I'd see the day whereby now she is asking me which other races are coming up that we can watch.

Contador; love him or hate him (and I think most cycling fans will fall into the latter category) you have to admire the determination to come back from an injury like just to make the start line. The fact that he rode so majestically through the mountain stages was all the more incredible.

Froome; it was good to see the start of Froome riding himself back to form and you'd have to hope that he won't have as much time off the bike next year. Indeed it was a much improved performance from Team Sky as a whole I felt. In many of the mountain stages they looked like the Sky of old driving the peloton & keeping the pace up to deter attacks. It would have been nice if Froome could have got through the race without crashing. Also, who would ever have thought that it would be the long TT that ultimately cost him a shot at overall victory

Quintana; such a shame that his race ended so early. Those mountain stages would have been so much better with the Colombian sparring with the other big hitters.

Aru; the arrival of a real GC contender?

Degenkolb; always nice to see him come out of Kittel's shadow & show us his quality. I much prefer to see the green jersey go to a sprinter rather than one of the GC boys personally (the points classification is the one area where the Vuelta really needs to improve).

All in all it felt that La Vuelta gave us the real heavyweight contest that we'd hoped for from le Tour.