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 8
Last stage. Basically, the riders will simply ride up the valley of the Maurienne (or valley of the Arc) and, from time to time, wander on its slopes to generate a climb. The final climb is about 10 km long, with a 7% gradient. The finish line is then laid after 5 km of a slightly bumpy plateau, which is in fact a part of the road around the Mont-Cenis reservoir.
Will Pogatchar allow other riders to win the green and dotted jerseys? At the moment, he leads the points classification (with the same number of points as Van der Poel) and the mountain classification (with the same number of points as Buitrago and Higuita)…
For the mountain jersey, Armirail (🇫🇷 Décathlon) managed to score a few points at almost each climb in the breakaway, and take over everybody, even Pogatchar who scored a few points in the final climb.
For the green jersey, Van der Poel (🇳🇱 Alpecin) got in the breakaway too and scored the best points of the intermediate sprint. However, Pogatchar finished 3rd of the stage and thus scored the same number of points. As they both started and finished today with the same number of points, and the second criterium is the number of stage victories, Pogatchar gets the green jersey.
Seixas (🇫🇷 Décathlon) proved that he is the worthy successor of Thibault Pinot by crashing while riding uphill in the final climb of the final day of this Criterium du Dauphiné, thereby losing 2 places in GC 😬