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)…
Trek didn’t want to pull on the flat to give a chance to Milan, and the rest of the peloton didn’t want to pull or attack, nobody wanted to use the work of the favorites’ teams had done to keep the gap low. Therefore the breakaway made it, in spite of all its effort to fail at it.