Stepping out of Juan Ayuso’s cosy rented apartment that has been repurposed from a ski chalet into a cyclist’s cabin, the setting sun is casting its last golden rays against Pico Veleta. At 3,398m high, it’s Europe’s highest road, inaccessible beyond 2,900m and blocked by eight-metre snow walls.

But figuring out a way to the top of Veleta is not The Athletic’s principal interest right now.

Four-time Tour de France champion Tadej Pogačar and his partner, AG Insurance–Soudal rider Urška Žigart, are holding hands like a pair of teenage lovers. Up ahead, 2026 Paris-Roubaix winner Wout van Aert is engrossed in a phone call.

Across the road from them at the Sierra Nevada ski station in southern Spain, Paul Seixas and his Decathlon CMA CGM team-mates are absorbed by what appears to be an impromptu game of hide and seek, with four or five of them crowding around the back of a telecommunications box, laughing and joking in French like the school-age child Seixas was just one year ago. They are seemingly oblivious to the five deer that have just skipped straight past them.

Scattered along the road are dozens of other WorldTour cyclists, each of them dressed in oversized puffer jackets and woolly hats.

It’s an absurd, surreal scene. Like a real-life sitcom of cycling superstars set on what feels like Europe’s most isolated street.

At the far end of Calle del Torcal is the high performance CAR centre which at 2,320m above sea level houses the continent’s highest soccer pitch, athletics track and Olympic-sized swimming pool. Not to mention pole vaulting apparatus, boxing rings and other sporting facilities. It’s a playground for the sporting elite.

This article was published by The Athletic/New York Times in June 2026. To read the full article click here.