Buneos Aires (Argentina) (AFP)
Frenchman Julian Alaphilippe, Slovakian Peter Sagan and Belgian Remco Evenepoel start their 2020 season on Sunday in the Tour of San Juan, which is made up of seven stages and nearly 1,000 kilometers in western Argentina.
For Alaphilippe and Evenepoel, the duettists of the Deceuninck team who started last season in the same race, it's a bis repetita. Especially since Alaphilippe, winner of two stages, was ahead of the general classification in 2019 only by the Colombian climber Winner Anacona.
"This event, which was the first of my professional career, will always remain special for me," said Evenepoel, the sensation of the year 2019, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Saturday. "We will try to be as successful as last year." With the advantage of an individual 15 km time trial on the third day of the race.
"With Julian and Remco, we are not going specifically for the general classification", however announces their sport director Davide Bramati, aware that the Argentinian race represents above all a warm-up in the middle of southern summer, far from the harshness of winter European.
The main race in this region of the world, the Tour of San Juan, the first edition of which took place in 1982, replaced the Tour of San Luis, a neighboring province, in 2017.
Twenty-four teams, including six from WorldTour (Bora, Cofidis, Deceuninck, Israël SN, Movistar, UAE Emirates), are entered. With, for other leaders, Sagan, the triple world champion who won a stage last year, the Colombians Fernando Gaviria and Alvaro Hodeg for the sprints, the Italian Filippo Ganna for the "stopwatch", and, on the French side , Guillaume Martin and Christophe Laporte.
© 2020 AFP