Tour de France director intends to reduce number of sprint stages into future: "They disappointed us a little bit and we won't include that many in the future!"

Joining a breakaway in flat transition stages had become sort of a suicide mission in recent years which only the smaller teams were interested in taking on - either for sponsor visibility, or to get a headstart into regularity classifications (such as the re-introduced Intergiro competition at the 2024 Giro d'Italia).

However this year not even the wild card teams were often interested in wasting their energy in front of the peloton, despite teams like TotalEnergies were lacking a real sprinter or a GC leader. As the race took off with two hard stages in Italy, there wasn't a leader's jersey in the stake on transition days, which likely put off most of the adventurers.

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A result? We have seen way too many stages where a breakaway never even formed, with the peloton cruising through the stage at a local commute pace. Naturally, not many fans were willing to glue themselves to the TV on such days, which was probably noticed in the numbers too.

Race director and architect of the course, Thierry Gouvenou, has a strong opinion on the matter. After seeing the spectacular racing in mountains, his resolution is to bring more harder, and presumably more entertaining stages. At least as long as teams refuse to put on a show on flat days themselves: "I think that we'll try to grow the number of stages like these. The sprinters stages disappointed us a little bit and we won't include that many in the future!," he told Radio Sports.

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