This year’s Vuelta is the 12th of De La Cruz’s career, and his 20th Grand Tour start overall, a milestone that speaks not only to longevity, but to consistency, resilience and the trust he has earned across some of the sport’s most demanding teams. Now, De La Cruz has decided that the time has come to close this chapter and retire from professional cycling.

“I am proud that I have been able to keep performing,” De La Cruz says. “Even in the last two years, at my age, I have still been able to be top ten in Tirreno-Adriatico, top 15 in the Giro this year, on the podium in races last year, including the national championships. I feel I have done things in the right way and kept performing until my final season. But I also feel that this is the right moment to move on, to stop while things are still good, and to leave space for the new generations.”

The standout moments
De La Cruz’s cycling journey has taken him through Caja Rural, Team NetApp-Endura, Etixx-Quick Step, Team Sky, UAE Team Emirates, Astana Qazaqstan Team, and finally Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team. Along the way, he has moved between personal ambition and team responsibility, often playing an important role in the mountains while also chasing his own results.

His standout moment came at La Vuelta in 2016, where he won stage 9 to Alto del Naranco and pulled on the red leader’s jersey. He would go on to finish seventh overall, a result he later matched in both 2020 and 2021. Beyond Spain, he also claimed two stage victories at Paris-Nice and spent 2020 as part of the UAE Team Emirates squad when Tadej Pogačar won the Tour de France for the first time. The Spanish rider has also had the privilege to sport the national champion’s jersey after he won the time trial in 2024.

Asked what stands out most, De La Cruz does not point to a single result. Instead, he talks about the range of experiences his career has given him: personal victories, leader’s jersey, team triumphs and the chance to ride alongside some of the best cyclists of his generation.

“I have been lucky to enjoy many different situations,” he says. “I’ve been able to win a stage and wear the leader’s jersey in La Vuelta. I’ve been able to be in so many good teams, surrounded by so many good riders, and get good results, personally and for my teammates.

But I will say that being in La Vuelta, doing a good GC and wearing the leader’s jersey was super special. But it also meant a lot to me to be there in 2020 when Tadej won the Tour the first time. It meant a lot to me because on the first day in Nice there was a massive crash where I had a small fracture. It was super painful, but I was able to finish the Tour in a good way, performing on the last TT, being in the top ten. And then the victory of Tadej was really incredible so I will say that moment is one of the most special to me.”

The value of experience
For De La Cruz, experience is not only something that comes with age. It is knowledge earned slowly: how to read a race, how to understand himself better and how to stay calm when the moment feels bigger than it is. When asked about the biggest differences between the rider who started his first Vuelta in 2013 to the rider who will now retire, De La Cruz says:

“I have much more experience now,” he says. “When you’re not that young, you don’t have the same level, but somehow you can compensate for that lack of power with experience. You read the race better. You understand yourself better. I would love to find myself in my primetime with the experience I have now. Then I could have really reached my full potential.”

That trade-off is one of the lessons of a long career. The body no longer responds in quite the same way, but the mind is clearer.

“You learn that the good moments are not that good and the bad moments are not that bad,” he says. “You need to approach it with the coldest blood possible and try to see the big picture, not just the small thing in the moment. For example, I now see how slow I am on the climbs compared to earlier. We did the same climb to Velifique in 2017, and I didn’t remember it was that hard. I remembered it as an easy climb, also with better roads this time. But the other day I thought: How is it possible that the climb is so hard? And that made me think: Why don’t we appreciate when we are good and how good we are? I’m complaining about how I’m feeling now, but in 20 years I might not even be able to push those numbers, so I think experience is also about seeing things with more optimism and reality.”

There are moments when that experience becomes visible in practical ways. During this year’s Vuelta, one stage was stopped because of hail and severe weather. As riders waited in wet kit in a hotel lobby, De La Cruz quickly asked the team’s head mechanic to arrange a hotel room for the group. While others remained downstairs with towels and hot drinks, the Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team riders were able to shower, change and return to the lobby warm, dry and ready for the bus. For De La Cruz, that kind of instinct is not only about years in the peloton. It is also part of who he is: always looking for a smarter way, always searching for a quicker route and always trying to make things better for the people around him.

One last Vuelta
For David De La Cruz La Vuelta carries the weight of farewell. After 17 seasons, 20 Grand Tour starts, 12 appearances at La Vuelta, a stage win in Spain’s biggest race, time in red, and two Paris-Nice stage victories, David De La Cruz is preparing to leave professional cycling with a career he can look back on with pride.