General Race Thread 2023 **spoilers**

Big afternoon for the Irish cyclists on the world tour today.

Sam Bennett is back in action in the Tour of Poland where Stage 1 should in a bunch sprint. He is up against Kooij, Merlier, Thijssen, Ackerman and Gaviria so a reasonably strong sprinters field. There should be at least 3 bunch sprints in Poland this year so important for Sam to feature prominently in all and nick 1 hopefully.

IMO opinion Sam's best hope of a big contract is to be seen as a consistent point scorer with a few wins throughout the season rather than waiting in the long grass and picking up a big win every now and again.

Eddie Dunbar also makes a return to racing and will be looking to keep himself safe ahead of the deciding stages later in the week. Personally not too worried about GC but would love to see Eddie take a maiden stage win in pro cycling.

Over in Spain Ben Healy is in action in San Sebastian and should feature in the deciding moments. A top ten would be an excellent result there as it is a fairly stacked field with a mix of riders hoping to hold form from the tour and others starting to aim for a busy final third of the season. coverage for that starts at 2pm on gcn.

I completely forgot about Tim Merlier, where has he been all year?? PCS showing hes hardly raced outside of belgium all season.

Re watching yesterdays stage - they made some balls of catching the break. Approx 30 seconds with 10km to go and they still hung on.

He tried to follow Remco and couldn't

Merlier, Kooij, Gaviria and Bennett in that order.

Sam went too early and faded

Too be fair he lost his leadout in crashes so was trying to ride the wheels but found himself on the front when Merliers lead out man peeled off early so had to go long but Merlier and Kooij came around easily and Sam sat up

Tiz on in Poznan 😉

Reading behind the scenes it is a political issue as a Polish media group part owned by the discovery group exposed a government story several years ago and the Polish government have been blocking their activities where possible ever since.

The crashes causes massive splits among GC riders and as the first one was outside 5km ( 2nd one was inside 3km) the race jury are trying to work out time gaps. Eddie is current down as 1.59 back but that is likely to chance they will change later

Edit: Maybe it won't change after all, Kwiatkowski was the only GC rider to make the lead group gaining over a minute on all other GC contenders. Hardly a home town decision incoming.

Some **** acting going on in TDFF

Gutted for Niewiadoma, looks like she lost the second place by less then 1 second.

With AVV retiring is there anyone who can take it to SD Worx next year I wonder as otherwise it'll become very boring.

8th in the end for Dunbar. Good to see him back in action

Eddie in the leading pack today. Effectively 10 of them haven’t lost any time so far. He moved down on GC based on placings

You’d assume he prefers to build up to the Vuelta without it