3 heavy-weight riders shall start: Pogatchar (🇸🇮 UAE), Vingegaard (🇩🇰 Visma) and Evenepoel (🇧🇪 Soudal-QS).
There will be a few outsiders as well, like Lipowitz (🇩🇪 Bora), Mas (🇪🇸 Movistar) or L. Martinez (🇫🇷 Bahrein).
This will be the last professional race of Romain Bardet (🇫🇷 Picnic). On the other side of the age spectrum, Seixas (🇫🇷 Decathlon) will start his first major race.
During the first half of the race, sprinters and punchers will battle for stages: Milan (🇮🇹 Lidl-Trek), Healy (🇮🇪 EF)…
Stage 2
A stage pretty similar to the first one, with another 6 small climbs to provide a bit of animation for the mountain jersey: two 4th cat and two 3rd cat. (2 & 1 pts) in the beginning of the course, then one 2nd cat. (5, 3, 2 & 1 pts) much later and one last 4th cat. near the end.
As on many (all?) French races, the amount of points offered is meagre, so there is not much point in fighting if you cannot be first. Same goes for the points classification, as there is a single intermediate sprint per day and it only gives points for the first 3 riders: therefore, there cannot be even a small sprint from the peloton after a small breakaway has already gone through the sprint line.
That’s a big difference from the Giro d’Italia which just ended, where points were given to many more riders.