Welcome back to the Lantern Rouge Cycling Podcast. You guessed it, another cracking stage of the Girod Italia 2024.

Stage 6 from Torre de Lago Puccini via Regio region to Rappolano-Terme, we've got, I don't know where we are in Italy, we're not,

I don't, oh no, we are in Tuscany maybe, we're near Tuscany, Florence is in Tuscany, so we're like,

New Siena.

Yeah. So yeah, it's pretty good wine country yeah it's some

really beautiful scenic shot stage really really nice stage anyway

Park with pancake flat for 64 kilometers that's an hour and a half, maybe an hour and 20,

then a Voltaire climb, 8.6 goes 4.6 percent, fake news climb, and then rolling hills in wine country for the next 100 ks or 90 ks including

three gravel sectors people keep telling us that they have star ratings I've not seen

star ratings anywhere anyway the first one's flat

four K's four K sorry. The second one is 3.3 K is the grotti 5% uphill gravel and

then a descent bit of a valley, a tarmac, and then the Piavena

climb which has a downhill gravel bit in it, and then the Rappolano climb 700 meters, 10%

with a nasty pinch in there before kind of a downhill rolling finish.

It was the favorite. Oh God sure. Yeah. I think that's understandable. Yeah.

On paper he can win this stage.

But we believe in the breakaway because there's so many teams that see the stage as okay.

The stage, favorite is Bogotchar in a sprint we can't win. So in a breakaway, the opportunity lies there.

There's a flat start which makes it a bit more difficult for a break to really form, I would say, in a a fast way but the names we were looking at to to go into the

moves were the likes of Stuyven the likes of Hormons we named like 75 riders of this peloton and that's about the amount of riders that try to attack in the first 100 kilometers of the stage because the breakaway formation phase was 100 kilometers, roughly.

The entire flat segment, no break had formed on the climb afterwards.

No break had formed yet, but there were intriguing parts to it.

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