By Cuinn Huber
The first day took the riders on a roughly 100 mile loop through the western Paris suburbs starting and finishing in Mantes-la-Ville; three Riders from the Jumbo Visma team broke away in the final miles with Christophe Laporte of France taking the final win.
Stage Two saw another flat 100 mile thriller finishing in Orléans, with Fabio Jacobsen of team Quickstep taking the stage win—an incredible feat considering just a year and a half ago he sustained career-threatening injuries in a crash at the tour of Poland, which put him in a coma and damaged his upper respiratory tract.
Stage Three saw another exciting sprint finish, but this time with a slight uphill path with Mads Pederson of Denmark taking the win. Near total disaster struck for the overall leader Christophe LaPorte when he crashed with just 200 meters to go. Luckily, he was not injured and kept his lead.
Stage four saw the first chance for general classification riders to make their mark on the race with an 8.3 mile time trial. Arguably the greatest cyclist in the world right now, Wout Van Aert took the win and the lead of the race with a time of 16:20 seconds with an average speed of over 30.5 miles per hour.
On stage five, the Americans finally broke through with Brandon Mcnulty accelerating away with 25 miles to go and winning by 1:58 seconds. The overall standings also changed with Primož Roglic of Slovenia taking the overall lead by 39 seconds over Simon Yates of the UK.
Hands down the most impressive breakaways of the race took place on stage six, with Mathieu Burgaudeau taking the victory and just barely holding off the pack of 100+ riders breathing down his neck in the last kilometer.
The one and only summit finish of this year’s race was on stage seven on top of the Col de Turini, a 9.25 mile ascent with a 7.2 percent gradient average. On the mountain, a group of the top climbers in the race broke away with the race leader Roglic sprinting away in the final 200 meters to take the win.
On the final stage, a 72 mile loop through the Maritime Alps surrounding Nice, Simon Yates attempted to take the overall lead, breaking away on the Col d’Èze and at one point gaining about a 25 second lead. However, on the descent back into Nice, the lead shrunk down to 10 seconds by the end of the stage, so the attempt was unsuccessful. The final overall standings were Primož Roglic, followed by Simon Yates 29 seconds back, and Colombia’s Daniel Martínez a further 2:08 back in 3rd. This was the first major stage race of the year, so we will see what the rest of the season brings!