Wout Poels of the Netherlands took victory in the penultimate stage of the Vuelta a España in Guadarrama, as, with only the ceremonial stage to Madrid remaining, American climber Sepp Kuss will complete an unprecedented Grand Tour grand slam for his sponsors, Jumbo-Visma.

Yet for all the high fives, warm hugs and fist bumps from superstar teammates, Jonas Vingegaard and Primoz Roglic during this year’s Vuelta, Kuss may still have spent much of the race expecting to pull a knife from his back.

The 29-year-old, leader of the Vuelta since stage eight, has long been the pair’s most loyal servant, yet on the climb of the Angliru, when Tour de France champion Vingegaard and Giro d’Italia winner Roglic noticed Kuss struggling, they repaid their debt to him by accelerating towards the finish.

As the race reached its denouement, Kuss’s overall lead was left hanging by a thread. Outrage, both within the race convoy and on social media, at the Jumbo-Visma team’s callousness, swiftly followed.

Surely the exemplary Kuss, who had so often sacrificed himself in support of the ambitions of his leaders, deserved the favour to be returned. How could they be so heartless?

By the next morning, Vingegaard was pleading innocence.

“It’s a team sport and Sepp has helped me so many times so why should I stab him in the back? That’s not who I am as a person,” Vingegaard said on Thursday.

“I was put in a somewhat difficult situation, where I felt that I was stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Roglic however, who had said the previous day that he was at the Vuelta “to race”, remained ambivalent. “I have my personal thoughts about it,” he said cryptically of his team’s tactics after the internecine rivalry was ended.

Why it took as long as 18 stages for team management to anoint Kuss as their chosen leader in the Vuelta remains unclear. By that point he had been in the race lead for 10 days and the team’s closest rival was four minutes behind.

But as the Vuelta entered its final weekend with Kuss on the verge, outwardly at least, there was harmony at long last. According to Roglic’s teammate Attila Valter, “even Primoz” was happy to see Kuss win.

Aside from the internal politics, the Jumbo-Visma team are about to complete an unprecedented achievement: victory in all three of Europe’s Grand Tours of Italy, France and Spain in the same season.

Inside five months, Roglic has taken the Giro’s pink jersey to Rome, Vingegaard the yellow jersey to Paris and now, Kuss is set to wear red in Madrid.

There have also been other successes: throw in Wout van Aert’s recent win in the Tour of Britain, Roglic’s multiple victories in the Tours of Catalunya, Burgos and in Tirreno-Adriatico, plus Vingegaard’s wins in the Tour of the Basque Country and the Critérium du Dauphiné and their hegemony is complete.

Such dominance has not been seen in cycling before. It has made their legions of fans joyful and sceptics uneasy.

The antidote to any cynicism towards their performances has been Kuss, a man so polite and thoughtful that even after Roglic did not hesitate to leave him behind on the Angliru, he stepped out of his team car in the mountain drizzle to offer the Slovenian the front seat.

“I’m not the person that’s the loudest in the room,” Kuss said towards the end of the week after his team had finally agreed to support his race leadership rather than undermine it. Yet his quiet contribution as the team’s kingmaker has been immense.

“GC Kuss” as he has become known, raced in all three of Jumbo-Visma’s Grand Tour grand slam races. The American, who finished 12th overall in the 2023 Tour and 14th overall in the 2023 Giro, was riding his fifth straight Grand Tour in the service of either Roglic or Vingegaard.

Shortly before the race started in Barcelona, he was asked which were his most memorable days in Grand Tour racing. After a pause, he said: “Any day in the mountains when I was able to make a difference.”