I do agree with the opinions that if we had this same race, but instead of TGH, Hindley, Almeida, Kelderman or Bilbao it were guys like Yates, Quintana, Landa , G or Dumoulin, it would've been considered an all-timer. But what can you do, I loved the Stelvio stage, but at the same time I found myself not really caring about who will win or anything like that, just wanting to see chaos, which I absolutely got.
So yeah, not really sure here, because the race was great, pretty much all you could ask for with such field. Some good medium mountain/hilly stages, the Sagan solo win, and the big mountains delivered too. Shame about the Sestriere stage obviously, but even that turned out to be really good.
At the end of the day, of all the editions I've seen, I am putting this ahead of 2019, 14-11, 2009. Worse than 18-15 and 2010. So a very solid 7, which again, with top names innit probably would've been maybe even a 9. But maybe we will be looking at this one differently in a few years, when Hindley or Hart do indeed turn out to be more than just guys who took advantage of an already weak field getting even much more weak with Yates, Krujswijk and G abandoning and Nibali not being in a top form and one of them/both become big time Grand Tour rider/riders, who knows.