The Tour has not been very experimental for many years. The biggest question in the past decade about the course has been if there is a TTT and what the rules would be for it. This year they showed a little more creativity with no prologue TT and did a road stage that actually had a challenging finish. This sort of finish is common in the Giro, but for the first week of the Tour we are usually stuck with stages that the last 30 km are dead flat so the only reason an overall contender appears in the top 10 is that he was riding at the front just to stay out of the way. In today’s stage the results looked like what you would expect from Liege-Bastogne-Liege in April with many of the over all contenders being in the top including stage winner Valverde.
The next 2 stages are more traditional first week stages for the Tour, but I expect in one of them for a small break to get away and end up 3-4 minutes ahead of the field. There are just not enough teams this year that will work hard to get a big field sprint.
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