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)…
It was quite a surprise to see Stewart come out of nothing for that win, but very deserved and well done!
(Caveat: I didn’t see any replay of the final, so I only have my first impression – which often turns out faulty after checking – as a base…) With the curves, positioning played a big role, it didn’t look like anyone could produce a really big kick in the last straight line. Then a legless Milan went backwards, and Van der Poel was cooked by his efforts in the previous mile to keep position because he worn his teammates out earlier (also possibly a bit by his staying at the very front of the peloton in the last climb); Penhoët was simply being Penhoët: this guy always finishes around the 5th place, no matter who the guys ahead of him are, you’d put him in a local junior race, he would still finish 4th 😄