Stage 4: Valkenburg - Liège, 123 km
Start time: 12:25 CEST. There will be live pictures after about 90 minutes.
Expected finish time: Around 16:00.
Weather: Around 22 °C. It will rain during the stage, and there's a chance of thunderstorms appearing in the area.
The riders have travelled 200 km from Rotterdam in order to answer the age old question:
What if Amstel Gold Race and Liège-Bastogne-Liège were just one race?
After a loop on the AGR circuit, the peloton will make its way towards Belgium. An intermediate sprint in Pepinster is followed by the Mont-Theux, before the riders enter the current LBL final for the last 35-ish km. A bonus sprint has been placed at the end of the false flat stretch that follows the Côte de la Roche-aux-Faucons. We'll see, if that will have any influence on the racing. You'd expect it to be ridden more conservatively than the usual LBL, especially since we got 4 long stages coming up, but RaF should still be hard enough to cause splits no matter what.
The SDW riders are in a pretty good position after yesterday's ITT and won't have to do anything, so it might be up to teams like Canyon-SRAM and FDJ to keep the pressure on. However if they try to attack, they will probably be followed by Bredewold, Vas and Fisher-Black who will just sit in their wheels. Visma know that Vos can't survive unless the pace isn't extremely high, so they won't necessarily be that interested in riding aggressively, but with Henderson, Van Empel and Henderson they still have multiple options.