Stage 2, Sunday 5

169 km, D+ 2000 m

A stage for punchers, again finishing in Barcelona’s Montjuic

This stage was turned into a joke. Nobody attacked, except for Johannessen (🇳🇴 Uno-X) followed by Carapaz (🇪🇨 EF), about 18.3 yards from the top of the very last climb. It was just a strong-ish pace by the lone McNulty (🇺🇸 UAE) all along. And then Del Toro (🇲🇽 UAE) won because Pogatchar (🇸🇮 UAE) left him the victory. Yep.

Tomorrow, spectators will be banned from the part of the course in France, as there is a major forest fire developing (far) down the valley.

Stage 1, Saturday 1, Team Time Trial

20 km, D+ 220 m

A very short TTT in the streets of Barcelona, with some climbing near and at the end (your usual Montjuic).

This format created quite some mess. Suffice to say that Bernal (🇨🇴 Ineos) will wear the Green jersey tomorrow 🤣

At FDJ, the two guys who were supposed to aim for a modest top-20 in GC crashed. G. Martin🇫🇷 and Berthet🇫🇷 finished the stage, but the latter won’t restart tomorrow. Grégoire🇫🇷 finished very well, but it looked more impressive than it actually was because he used a huge gear ratio with a low frequency while standing up .

Astana also crashed.

At Ineos, Vauquelin🇫🇷 who was supposed to be the final arrow and hadn’t taken any relay, got a puncture… Subsequently, Ganna, who had taken the heaviest relays on the flat, was forced to also lead the finish. This beast managed to almost win! He climbed faster than all punchers and GC leaders, but one.

At Bora, Evenepoel🇧🇪 dropped Lipowitz🇩🇪 in the last climb.

De Lie (🇧🇪 Lotto) was completely ill. Cian U. (🇧🇪 Movistar) overheated, blew up and had cramps. O’Connor (🇦🇺 Jayco) quickly sank.

Vinegaard (🇩🇰 Visma) and Pogatchar (🇸🇮 UAE) are already on the podium. Top-10 favourites are already in the top-10… And there are still 20 stages to go.

It seems designed to create differences, so I guess there will be a few. What could happen to minimise them is one stronger leader with a weaker team vs the opposite; perhaps the Pogatchar-UAE vs Vingegaard-Visma will be along this line. But the flat section is relatively short (for a TTT), so I don’t know whether significant advantage can be gained there by a strong team.

I don’t expect much from Seixas/Decathlon, given what they showed on the Dauphiné.

It could be interesting to see what happens at Bora, performance-wise, but also circus-wise 😀

We can note that the organisers had the ‘brilliant’ idea of scheduling the last/favourite teams/leaders at the same time as the WC first 1/8^th match of the day 🙄 As if they couldn’t have made it just 20 minutes earlier…