It's hardly the season Australian cycling star Michael "Bling" Matthews planned but it could hardly be much better.
The 23-year-old Canberra product is leading the year's final grand tour, the Tour of Spain, after an impressive victory on stage three and is determined to hold the red jersey for his Australian-owned Orica-GreenEDGE team as long as possible.
A former under-23 world champion, Matthews announced himself in the same race last year when he won two stages.
And he backed it up by leading this year's opening grand tour, the Giro d'Italia, for six days after winning a stage on Monte Cassino.
He started this year with the Tour de France as his main goal.
That went out the window when a training crash ruled him out of the second and biggest of the great three-week races.
"To be honest, when the year started, I didn't know I was doing the Giro or the Vuelta," Matthews told cyclingnews.com.
"The plan was just to do the Tour, but now the back-up plan was perhaps even better than what the Tour could have been.
"Everything happens for a reason. You get smashed down sometimes and it's not the end of the world if you have a bad crash, and you have to believe in your training to come back stronger."
Monday's 197.8km third stage from Cadiz suited Matthews perfectly with its 1.8km uphill finish climb at Arcos de la Frontera.
With great help from his team who drove the pace for much of the day, he timed his finish perfectly, overhauling Dan Martin (Garmin-Sharp) to become the first Australian leader of the Vuelta since Cadel Evans in 2009.
"I'm just so happy that I got to finish off for them," Matthews said.
"It makes the win so much sweeter to be able to win when your whole team has absolutely smashed themselves for you."
The 10 bonus seconds on offer to winners of a stage allowed Matthews to move ahead of race favourite Colombian Nairo Quintana into the overall lead by four seconds.
Team director Neil Stephens raved about the teamwork which provided the win.
"This is one of the best collective wins this team has ever had and I have ever seen," Stephens said.
"Once we started working for the stage, we had to bite off a fair bit.
"A lot of the other teams were disinterested or knew that we were one of the favourites for the stage and they passed the work onto us."
Matthews signed a new two-year deal with Orica-GreenEDGE just before the start of the race.
And while he wasn't ready to relinquish the red jersey and hoped for further victories on suitable stages, he pointed out the team had other options for success with young general classification rider Esteban Chaves just 17 seconds back, in sixth place overall and climber Adam Yates also in the picture.
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