The fast men were in the spotlight on the first road stage of this edition.<\/p>\n
It took only a handful of seconds from the moment the flag was waved at the start of the day to have the first attack of the season. A couple of minutes later, the escapees were caught by the peloton, who was keen on fighting for the bonus seconds at the first intermediate sprint before letting a group go clear.<\/p>\n
Once that was out of the way, a three-man breakaway went up the road and built a gap of two minutes on the bunch. For a brief moment during the stage, there was a threat of crosswinds which saw several teams moves to the front of the field \u2013 who was spread across the road \u2013 but in the end things remained quiet and the teams interested in the stage continued to work behind the leading trio, clawing back time on Mengler\u2019s Hill.<\/p>\n
The sprinters\u2019 lead-out trains began taking shape in the final ten kilometers and the breakaway was reeled in with seven kilometers to go. Soudal Quick-Step was also present for Alberto Dainese, who concluded the stage won by Tobias Lund (Decathlon CMA CGM) as the team\u2019s best placed rider. Despite moving down a couple of positions in the overall standings due to the bonifications game, Andrea Raccagni continues to sit just a few seconds from the podium and the white jersey.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Photo credit:\u00a0\u00a9Con Chronis \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fast men were in the spotlight on the first road stage of this edition. It took only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,76256,82],"class_list":["post-422989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-soudal-quick-step-pro-cycling-team","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}