Team Ineos headline Route d'Occitanie – Preview

Egan Bernal (Team Ineos) salutes his home crowd ahead of stage 4 of the 2020 Tour Colombia 2.1 in February
Egan Bernal (Team Ineos) salutes his home crowd ahead of stage 4 of the 2020 Tour Colombia 2.1 in February. He’ll return to racing action at the Route d’Occitanie in France (Image credit: Getty Images Sport)

Racing returns to France on Saturday with the start of the four-day Route d'Occitanie, which features a host of Tour de France hopefuls – notably defending champion Egan Bernal and four-time winner Chris Froome, both of Team Ineos, and a trio of French favourites in the shape of Thibaut Pinot (Gropupama-FDJ), Romain Bardet (AG2R La Mondiale) and road race national champion Warren Barguil (Arkéa-Samsic).

What was for many years the Route du Sud – a race that stuck extremely close to the Pyrenees – the Route d'Occitanie (pronounced 'Oxy' rather than 'Ocky') now covers a huge swathe of terrain across southern France, including much of the ground that once featured in the much-missed GP de Midi Libre. Its format, however, remains essentially the same as it was under its Route du Sud guise, with two relatively straightforward stages to begin with, a tough stage in the mountains on day three that's very likely to decide the overall winner, and a sprinter-friendly finale to finish.

Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014). 

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