Hardest stage of the week coming up, lots of up and down but just small hills. Because many are in the final we will see many attacks and if it’s a sprint the peloton will be reduced in size a lot.
For GC everything seems kind of into place, Tim Wellens has a 48 second advantage on Michal Kwiatkowski who is in fourth. In between there is Theuns, but he will loose a lot in the time trial. Also Mads Wurth Schmidt, he can do a good time trial but because it’s not flat Kwiatkowski is probably ~15 seconds faster. Kwiatkowski can’t make up 48 seconds on Wellens in a 10k time trial normally. If Ineos want the GC win they have to go for it tomorrow. They have a strong team but so does Lotto – Soudal, probably the 2 strongest teams in the race.
The stage 4 finish is 1.1km uphill at 5.5% average, something for the puncheurs. They will do this climb 4 times because of local laps. It starts easy with 300m ~3% and becomes steeper later on up to 9 %. Last 100m it flattens out again.
On stage 1 we saw Laporte and Bouhanni do really well on a similar finish but the run-in on this stage is a lot harder, I believe we will see other riders at the front.
Most notably a few riders that have been really active in stage 3; Bettiol, van Avermaet, Kwiatkowski and Mollema. How the stage is going to pan out depends mostly on Ineos in my opinion, if they are really going to give GC a try we will see a great stage. Breakaways have a chance as well on the local laps with some smaller roads.
I came up with these riders:
*** Greg van Avermaet, Michal Kwiatkowski
** Alberto Bettiol, Bauke Mollema, Tim Wellens, Edward Theuns, Oliver Naesen, Odd Christian Eiking, Anthony Turgis
* Nacer Bouhanni, Christophe Laporte, Jake Stewart, Jordi Meeus, Nils Politt, Bryan Coquard, Mads Wurth Schmidt