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Tour de France Tour de France 2024, Stage 3: Plaisance (Piacenza) > Turin (Torino), 230.8 km

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Congratulations to Biniam Girmay Hailu for winning the stage and making history.

Peloton mostly uninterested in doing anything today, beyond riding for 200km+. Some GC teams even not interested in fighting for positions at the front, rather smart if you ask me. Still some crashes at the end, reduced bunch for sprint and Carapaz sprinting and taking the leaders jersey, likely to sleep in it tonight. Congrats!
 
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Chapeau Girmay - tight there against the barriers but good turn of speed. De Lie the normal bad placing problem but he'll learn. Carapaz in yellow - not on my bingo card but maybe no one else really wanted it so early.
Remco 1 man down as Pedersen has gone home.
 
Most boring stage in years.
This is the problem with Vaughters' beloved guaranteed invite stage. With no actual wildcards, and pretty much every team having a guarantee of being at all the biggest races, the value of TV time for the sponsor is eroded to almost none, and the expansion of the WT and investment needed to be competitive enough to get to this level means the cost to the kind of sponsor for whom that would be sufficient exposure is prohibitive.

Teams want rid of the sponsor model and more guaranteed money for stability, understandably, but without smaller sponsor-driven teams for whom the TV time is their lifeblood, and an ever dwindling amount of space on startlists at the biggest races for any team but those which have guaranteed invites at ALL the big races so don't need that airtime, we can expect more stages like this in future. Stage 5 2020 likewise had no break and nothing happen.