Ineos Grenadiers will field their Giro d’Italia team leaders at next week’s Tour of the Alps, with Geraint Thomas, Tao Geoghegan Hart, Pavel Sivakov and Thymen Arensman part of their squad for the five-day stage race in Austria and Italy.
Remco Evenepoel will be in Belgium for Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Primoz Roglic has opted not to race before the Giro but Ineos Grenadiers always use the mountainous route of the Tour of the Alps as a key final race before the Corsa Rosa.
Thomas won the Tour of the Alps in 2017, while Sivakov and Geoghegan Hart finished first and second in 2019, and Arensman finished third last year while riding for Team DSM and overall winner Romain Bardet.
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Other notable names this year include Jack Haig (Bahrain Victorious), Hugh Carthy (EF Education-EasyPost), Ivan Sosa (Movistar), Joe Dombrowski (Astana Qazaqstan), Chris Froome (Israel-Premier Tech), and the Bora-Hansgrohe duo of Lennard Kämna and Aleksandr Vlasov.
"The Tour of the Alps occupies a perfect spot on the calendar to see where the guys are at with their form," said Ineos Grenadiers directeur sportif Matteo Tosatto, who will direct the team at the Tour of the Alps and the Giro d’Italia.
"In recent years we have seen how those who win stages or the general classification at the Tour of the Alps are usually the ones-to-watch at the Giro d'Italia as well.
"We'll have a very competitive line-up, which will also serve to see who will represent the team at the Giro d'Italia. Everyone is coming back from a period of training at altitude; we’ll start with the ambition to win."
Also in the expected Ineos Grenadiers line-up are road captain Salvatore Puccio, Laurens De Plus and Ben Swift.
Thomas will fly directly from an altitude training camp at Sierra Nevada in southern Spain to Austria for the Tour of the Alps. He repeatedly suffered with an infection in the early months of the season and so might not be Ineos Grenadiers’ protected leader at the race.
"We will decide stage-by-stage with him," Tosatto explained. "Geoghegan Hart and Arensman will take aim at the overall classification, Sivakov too. It's a race we can win and strategise different plans of action."
The 2023 Tour of the Alps starts in Rattenberg, Austria on Monday with an uphill finish in Alpbach and ends in Brunico on Friday. Stage 3 finishes atop the 15.5km Passo San Valentino overlooking Lake Garda, while stage 4 to Predazzo has 3610 metres of climbing in just 152km of racing.
"The first stages are beautiful but not very hard, they’re suited to Tao Geoghegan Hart," Tosatto suggested.
"The hardest stage, however, is definitely the third one, with a very demanding final climb where good legs are needed and where there could be race-deciding gaps."
