PREVIEW | Tour de la Provence 2025 stage 1 - Roller-coaster queen stage can decide race winner
Cycling
From the 14th of the 16th of February the racing in France continues with another prestigious stage-race. In the south of the country, the Tour de la Provence will provide good opportunities for the sprinters and classics riders to work on their form and fight for stage wins. We preview stage 1.
The first day of the race is coincidentally the hardest and one that is very difficult to control. The riders begin to tackle climbs right from kilometer 0 and until the finish it's a constant roller-coaster of a day.
There will be 2600 meters of climbing and the first half of the stage mainly is very hard. Without a race leader at the same time, it is expected that there will be a big fight to be in the breakaway and this will include some of the strongest riders in the race. This is because there will be a downhill trend to the final half of the day, with several small climbs... Putting on a chase will be hard and bringing back attackers will be a very difficult task.
Prediction Tour de la Provence 2025 stage 1:
*** Mads Pedersen
** Toms Skujins, Bauke Mollema, Matej Mohoric, Samuele Battistella
* Fred Wright, Dorian Godon, Pierre Gautherat, Marijn van den Berg, Darren Rafferty, Ewen Costiou, Pascal Ackermann, Sandy Dujardin, Mathieu Burgaudeau, Lukas Kubis
Pick: Toms Skujins
How: Lidl-Trek will have good numbers, and Skujins will either win solo or in a small group from a long-distance attack.
Original: Rúben Silva
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- ugh. slice and dice this any way you like. if you’re one of the belgians TRYING to believe wout is going to be in the fight at de ronde and roubaix, this is an ice cold dose of reality. my opinion is that nobody — ESPECIALLY his own team — should have been fanning any expectations of wout at this point after what he’s endured.OCexile02-04-2025
- I guess when you’re high, you don’t (need to) focus on anything ;-)Mistermaumau02-04-2025
- True but things also change, Primoz will get older, Remco crashes, MJ isn’t peaking yet and people can improve their weaknesses faster than others improve their strengths, cf MVDP climbing, JV TTing.Mistermaumau02-04-2025
- Sorry, yeah doesn’t look great but it seems all the recent context gets completely ignored in order to make a big story out of this. Honestly, did anyone at this point really expect Wout to suddenly have recovered all his missing form? Respect to Powless but he’s no nobody, his 2022-2023 presaged something like this. Yes they messed up but it also nearly worked, impossible to know how good your opponent is going to be in such a situation unkess it’s an in form Pog or MVDP. I’d not see this as a disaster but a really bad call, there are positives, they distanced a very strong 2nd group (Mads might be saving himself though) and Wout was very close to a place he’s not heen in a long time. I’d call that progress. Only a few meters would have led to completely different headlines. Why make everything so boack and white? Wout obviously understands and it is in part everyone putting all that pressure on him that led to him making a bad call. That said, had he let his mates go for the win (no guarantee either) héd have received different criticism.Mistermaumau02-04-2025
- Pogi is just had 9 days of racing.
James2631802-04-2025 - I’d advise doing brain scans during max efforts, you never know, he may be having micro blackouts without realising it at the time and with a crash you tend not to remember it after either. Like when you nod off a split second while driving, or realise you can’t remember any details from the last few km.Mistermaumau02-04-2025
- I can't believe what I just saw. Reminds me of Ian Stannard beating 3 Quickstep riders in Omloop. Not sure what's going on with Wout. Maybe just needs more time, but he has not looked great since that Vuelta crash.Pedalmasher02-04-2025
- They wanted Wout to win so they chose a losing tacticsvappaxbipmv02-04-2025
- Well that sure didn't look good for Visma. After all that. Wow.RidesHills02-04-2025
- I disagree. Jorgensen has a worst TT than Remco or Roglic, on any terrain, and is worse in the mountainsvappaxbipmv02-04-2025