This WT stage race goes from Sunday to Sunday, and there will be climbs everyday, even on the TTT which will therefore be exceptionally difficult.
Unfortunately, this is yet another race which was 'bought' by the local elected officials, who changed its name to promote their fiefdom, and ⅓ of the Dauphiné will never be visited any more, as it belongs to a different administration.
Riders
No Pogatchar, no Vingegaard; this leaves the door open for the next level of favourites: the UAE duo Almeida🇵🇹/Del Toro🇲🇽 and Ze Elect (🇫🇷 Decathlon). Skjelmose (🇩🇰 Lidl-Trek) and Jorgenson (🇺🇸 Visma) will be the main outsiders.
Stages
(I apologise if the pictures look shitty, but they were already horribly compressed Jpeg on the official website...)
NB: there are no time bonuses on this race, neither at the end of stages nor within them.
Stage 1 (Sunday 7)
146 km, 3200 m D+
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Stage 2 (Monday 8)
234 km, 3700 m D+
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Stage 3 (Tuesday 9) Team Time Trial
27 km, 400 m D+
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Stage 4 (Wednesday 10)
167 km, 2100 m D+
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Stage 5 (Thursday 11)
196 km, 2200 m D+
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Stage 6 (Friday 12)
183 km, 2900 m D+
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Stage 7 (Saturday 13)
134 km, 3700 m D+
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Stage 8 (Sunday 14)
120 km, 4100 m D+
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Final stage
km 35: NOoooOOooOooooo...
You were supposed to be the new Hinault, not the new Pinot 😠ðŸ˜
Del Toro (🇲🇽 UAE) left no chances to the others, clinical. Lidl-Trek rode all day long, he just had to finish in the last climb after a short relay by Sivakov.
Van Gils (🇧🇪 Bora) came back from holidays, and stayed with Tuckwell🇦🇺 and helped him finish on the 2^nd^ step of the final podium!
Caja Rural confirmed its good performance, with Para🇪🇸 and Castellon🇪🇸 making it again in the top-15 of the stage, which allows them to score a 9^th^ and a 11^th^ place in the final GC.
The invisible man G. Martin (🇫🇷 FDJ) curiously manages to score a top-10 too. Not sure how, he never did better than 15^th^ on any stage 😄 In the same team, Braz🇫🇷 was in the breakaway one more time and quickly secured the Mountain jersey. Quite an achievement in theory, except that I would have liked that someone contested the points at least once this week... Anyway, he made it an objective and he got it, that's so much better than what FDJ accustomed us to do along the years, always neglecting secondary objectives to (not) catch the big one.
Yet another failure for Vauquelin (🇫🇷 Ineos). He and his team were very active today, but in the end he finishes far and drops to 15^th^ place in GC.
At Decathlon, Bisiaux🇫🇷 could not make up for Seixas🇫🇷's withdrawal and secure an honest GC ranking. He was in the breakaway but was dropped twice, and then couldn't stay in the peloton either. He finished behind domestiques who stopped riding when the last climb started. Close to top-10 this morning, he got kicked out of top-20... It is a terrible final assessment for Decathlon's week: by putting all their eggs in the same basket, they lost everything, as I feared before the week-end started. They were nowhere on stages (bar a 3^rd^ place on the 1^st^ stage by Bisiaux), they are nowhere in secondary classifications, and they are nowhere in final GC... In UCI terms, that less than 100 points in 8 days, for a team which aimed at final victory...
Tuckwell🇦🇺, beaten on GC, couldn't get the Youth classification either, for all 3 members of the present GC podium are eligible to Youth classification... I hope it could finish to demonstrate how pointless the U23 category has become, and that it is time for UCI to reform it, as well as for race organisers to suppress the Youth jersey and replace it with amore interesting secondary classification.