It's part of the anatomy of the cycling calendar that every grand tour is preceded by a short warm-up stage race in a mountainous part of the country that hosts the three-week race. The Giro contenders use the extremely mountainous Giro del Trentino to prepare for the biggest Italian race while the Tour favourites head to the Alps and the Dauphiné to finish off their build-up for the world's biggest bike race. The Vuelta counterpart to those two races is the Vuelta a Burgos which starts today and offers the riders for the Spanish grand tour a perfect opportunity to test themselves out in high mountains, on short, explosive finishing climbs and in fierce crosswinds - three challenges that often play a crucial role in determining the overall winner of the three-week Spanish race. Starting at 15.20 you can follow the first stage of the Spanish race on CyclingQuotes.com/live.

Among the Vuelta contenders, it is mainly the riders who also raced the Tour de France that have decided to skip the possibility to build up their form in Burgos during the coming week. Among the riders that weren't present in the French grand tour, most will be present on the start line later today. Vincenzo Nibali and Ivan Basso continue the preparation that was kicked off in Poland last week while Samuel Sanchez kicks off his autumn season on his Spanish home soil. Among these riders, only Basso can be expected to fight for the win while Nibali and Sanchez will mainly use the race to prepare for later objectives. Instead, the big favourite is Nairo Quintana who won't race the Vuelta and so can allow himself to go all out for the win on a course that suits him perfectly.

Yesterday's stage was one for the explosive puncheurs and as usual, those riders have plenty of opportunities in the first part of the event. The race continues on Thursday with a 157km stage from Roa de Duero to Clunia. From the start, the riders will head out on a small 17km circuit around Roa de Duero before taking on the journey towards Clunia. The riders won't take the direct route but despite the small digressions, the roads will be mostly flat. A couple of smaller climbs will challenge the riders a bit but none of them have been categorized and the only dangerous aspect of the early part of the race is the wind which is not expected to be as strong as in previous years.

However, the finish in Clunia is a little tricky. The penultimate kilometre has an average gradient of 2% while the road kicks up with a 3% gradient when the riders pass the flamme rouge. From then on, it gets steeper and the final 500m have a gradient of 6%.

Clunia has hosted a finish in both 2011 and 2012. In 2011, race leader Rodriguez decided to give Moreno a chance to take a stage win and the Spaniard didn't disappoint, putting 1 second into a small group that was led across the line by Samuel Sanchez. Last year Paul Martens produced a really powerful attack on the final climb to hold off Moreno by 2 seconds while Simon Clarke, Nacer Bouhanni, Stefano Garzelli and Matti Breschel  led a small group across the line 3 seconds later. On that occasion, the wind had already blown the race to pieces and we could see a similar scenario this year. In any case it should be another stage for riders like Daniele Ratto, Simone Ponzi, Anthony Roux and Giovanni Visconti.

Starting at 15.30 you can follow the stage here and you can read our race preview here.