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 6
The last 3 stages are mountain stages, with final climbs. On Friday, we have 2 steep but relatively short climbs in the second half of the course; however, they are separated by 25 of flat valley, so we can suppose that the serious things will wait for the final climb. It presents 3 thirds: the 1st one is rather steep (> 9%), the middle one softer probably around 5%, and the last one of your normal 7-8% grade.
None of the 2 Visma, nor anyone else could resist Pogatchar today… The hopes for a Vingegaard better than Pogatchar this week, and therefore able to fight on the Tour of France in a few weeks from now, were rather disappointed.
UAE, VIsma and Decathlon leaders had respectively 1, 2 and 1 teammate(s) in the flat valley after the first hard climb, yet nobody pulled. I think it is understandable from the point of view of UAE and Visma who were just trying to eliminate each other without much consideration for outsiders, and called it a draw until the last climb when they saw they were still together; however I think Armirail should have pulled for Seixas as it would have been beneficial for him to leave all the guys from the second group behind, instead of letting them come back for free.