sincos

Possibly Padun. I don't think EF have fully settled on their Tour roster, Dauphine and TdS will help sort that out.

As for the Giro, first off, congrats to Hindley, great result for him. He never showed weakness in the mountains and had a parcours perfectly matched to his strengths. That said, the stages were nearly all great but the race .. .not one of the epic ones. Bardet (who'd been in good form) and Almeida (who'd been saying he wasn't feeling great for several days before retiring) getting sick and pulling out completely changed the race. A decent TT earlier in the race would have kept the climbers honest and attacking more. Still, we got stage 10 and Girmay's crazy l o o o ng sprint, MVdP finishing a GT, Hindley's win and Lopez defending mightily on the Blockhaus, the ever awesome Dolomites. As someone won over by IWG, I'll add Hirt in the top 10 (my one correct pre-race prediction -- which is much better than I usually do) along with Pozzovivo, Also Covi's 50km solo over the Pordoi and up the Fedaia.

Speaking of which, it would turn out to be academic but why didn't UAE help Almeida more. Covi's solo showed he had strength to burn after three weeks, and some help in the valleys and Covi on the mountains would have helped Almeida conserve energy. Not clear how UAE are going to keep both Covi and Almeida happy now. Even more baffling was Bahrain on that penultimate stage. Novak was sitting on, sitting on, sitting on in the break, then suddenly attacks and tries to close down Covi on the Fedaia. Meanwhile, his team leader still has an outside chance for pink, a chance that would be greater if Novak, who clearly still had good legs, had dropped back to help him as Kamna did for Hindley. All that sitting on would have made sense if it was about conserving energy to help Landa, but he didn't do that and didn't even get the stage. Most likely it would not have been enough but you have to try.