Male Team 05 - 12 Sep
Tour of Britain
1308 Kilometers 8 Stages
All stages will be shown live in its entirety on ITV4, while Eurosport / GCN will broadcast 2h30 each day at 1300 BST.
Looking only at the race profiles, one could think that the Tour of Britain is a race really suited for the sprinters. However, it’s hardly the case: the weather is not easy with the riders; roads are far from being motorways -narrow, sometimes not draining perfectly, with lots of road furniture, cattle grids, difficult areas-; squads are down to six riders each, which makes it difficult to control; and being held as a late-season event turns it into really tough for many competitors.
The Tour of Britain, the penultimate stagerace of the 2021 season for the Blues before the Giro di Sicilia, will pay, with its south-to-north parcours, an inadvertent tribute to the Land’s End to John O’Groats route. However, it won’t be the nearly 1,000km journey most cyclists do, rather than more than 1,3000km, entering Wales for two full stages and finishing with another two days in Scotland.
Even if any stage can be decisive in this event, our readers should probably pay special attention to four: the opening day in Cornwall (Sunday 5th), with an endless series of small climbs and a lumpy finish in Bodmin; the team time trial stager three (Tuesday 7th), over 18km and a quite hilly second half of the race en route to the National Botanic Garden of Wales; the other Welsh stage (Wednesday 8th), with the 10% slopes of Marine Drive right before the uphill finish in Great Orme / Llandudno; and stage six to Gateshead (Friday 10th), with three categorized climbs halfway through the route and some tough ascents before yet another hill-top finish.