And if there are no time gaps that put the better climbers at a disadvantage, then they don't race on the road because they can do it in smaller, energy-saving bursts. We can point at the positive race in the 2022 Tour, but just the same you have the 2020 Tour, with Jumbo trying to win in time gains from uphill sprints exclusively before losing the title in the only ITT at the end of the race, or the 2012 Giro where everybody was so close on time that surely it was a super exciting race... except it wasn't, it was an absolute heap of mediocrity with everybody riding in formation on every mountain stages and then Purito attacking to gain five seconds at 250m to go (hyperbole).
Time gaps that put some capable GC riders at a disadvantage are crucial to incentivising action. I know that at the moment many of the best climbers ARE also the best TTers, but while the Wiggins tour is reductio ad absurdum (although he was the 2nd best climber in that race anyway), it's not like there weren't strong TTers contending for the podium when Contador, Evans or Menchov were around. The likes of Carapaz, Bernal, Quintana, López, they should be having to make speculative moves and desperation assaults to try to compete with the more rounded riders. That's how the pure climber has historically contended GCs, the Lucien van Impes, the Federico Bahamontes, the Lucho Herreras, the José Manuel Fuentes, the Claudio Chiappuccis, the Marco Pantanis. Hell, back in the day a fast pace on a flat stage and the best climbers would be turfed out the back in a way that's just not possible today with the increased professionalism and depth in the péloton. That's why they're beloved and there is so much romance in the sport attached to the wispy pure escalador. If they aren't disadvantaged by the TT mileage, then they don't have to attack from deep and the race is duller. The 2022 Tour had big gaps, and that was what made it good, because Pogačar couldn't just overhaul his deficit in ten second chunks in the last kilometre over and over, nor could he just sit in and wait for a TT where he was inevitably going to win like, say, Dumoulin's Giro win where the onus was on Quintana to extend his lead, not Dumoulin to attack it. The other issue is that with limited challenge against the clock, MTF-heavy mountain stages where the earlier climbs are likely to be soft-pedalled or tough flat stages to control, a team can just produce a super-powered mountain train and result in more domestiques being available when they hit the final climbs and less time spent with the leaders working mano a mano.
The ITT is not the only means to force these gaps, but it is the easiest and most obvious way to guarantee them - there are lots of other ways via rouleur challenges, and stages that force teams to balance out the selection, but sometimes those are dependent on location hosts (the cobbles of the north, the ribinou of Brétagne, for example) or the weather (crosswind stages). If ASO unveil their flat stages and there are a number of such challenges - ramps and repechos that will force gaps, crosswind-baiting stretches, dirt roads, bergs and similar that mean that we can expect sizable gaps from flat stages other than from an ITT, then it may not be a problem at all. Just look at the 2010 Giro, a much-loved race, but that only had 37km of ITT, 13 of which was a cat.1 mountain. However, alongside that it had 32km of TTT that forced more balanced selections (and in which Scarponi lost more time than in the rest of the race put together thanks to being pegged to Jackson Rodríguez' pace, an example I've often used against the fairness of the TTT), two 200+ kilometre flat stages in the Netherlands, one of which followed the coast and resulted in major echelon action, and a 200+ kilometre stage with dirt roads (which also had rain). Even before the L'Aquila stage that set the race into overdrive with the 50-man break and lack of control, Vino and Evans had a solid amount of time gained on Basso, Nibali, Scarponi and co., but Vino had lost a domestique and Evans had lost two. Both would be down to four helpers after stage 11. So you can get it right with a lack of time trial mileage and a good balance between the flatter stages and the mountain stages for time gap potential - but it's a much harder job to get right that way.
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