Tour de France 2024 stage 2 preview: Route map and profile of 199km perfect for peloton’s puncheurs

After one of the most brutal opening stages ever seen at the Tour de France comes a slightly more forgiving day in Italy, one that will have the puncheurs of the peloton licking their lips.

Romain Bardet won stage one with a stunning attack aided by his brilliantly impressive dsm-firmenich PostNL teammate Frank van den Broek, riding in his first Tour de France. The 23-year-old Dutch rider moved aside to allow Bardet to clinch the stage win and he will wear the maillot jaune on Sunday for the first time in his career, in what is the 33-year-old’s last Tour de France.

The job of Van den Broek and the rest of the team now is to protect the yellow jersey on a day when another breakaway is likely to form early in the race and a small time gap at the front of the race could see Bardet lose the overall lead.

After beginning the day in Cesenatico, the relatively flat first 70km will take the peloton up Italy’s easy coast, where winds could be a factor in breaking up the pack, and then west inland to the Imola motor racing circuit. From there, several small climbs pave the road to Bologna, and the stage finishes with two loops around the city.

Who will win a stage like this one? A breakaway could feasibly get ahead and stay away but more likely is that they are kept on a tight leash and reeled in. Most of the sprinters will be shaken off on the climbs but some of the more rounded power riders, like Wout van Aert and Mads Pedersen, could make it to the finish with the peloton, guided over the climbs by their teammates. If that is the case, they will be huge favourites in a sprint to the line and it will require a bold attack from range to thwart them.

Stage 2 map and profile

Start time

The stage is set to begin at 11.35am BST, and is expected to conclude at around 5.45pm.

Prediction

Stage one was a reminder that almost anything can happen at the Tour de France, and stage two is equally hard to predict. We suspect any early breakaway will be shut down later in the day, setting up a small bunch sprint between the remaining fast riders who managed to cling on over the climbs. Wout van Aert is exactly that kind of profile.