Cycling: In the shadow of the Tour de France, the two next largest tours, the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a Espana, seem to have been fighting each other for a number of years with more and more spectacular routes and tougher races. The organizers of the Vuelta a Espana have now taken the next step and abolished the two rest days and replaced them with two additional stages. According to this, the drivers should contest a total of 2018 stages in the 23 edition.
Already this year, the Vuelta a Espana caused a lot of excitement and unrest with its number of mountain finishes. As a harbinger of the route presentation in January, the Vuelta Organization announced via Twitter that, due to frequent requests, the Tour of Spain would be expanded to 23 stages and the two rest days would therefore be deleted. According to the UCI regulations, this is even a violation of the rules, as two rest days are mandatory on a Grand Tour.
https://twitter.com/lavuelta/status/946349768422428673
It won't hit the drivers that badly, the message is much more of a kind of April Fool's joke. In Spain, December 28th is a Day of the Holy Innocents and is the equivalent of April 1st there. The joke was even supported by the UCI, as the association's website had simply deleted the rest days from the racing calendar. Lucky again!