Sagan, Van Avermaet and Dumoulin vie for Eneco Tour honours

Monday sees the start of the 12th Eneco Tour, a seven-stage WorldTour race in the Netherlands and Belgium. It’s the final stage race of the 2016 WorldTour season and its penultimate contest, its position in the calendar ensuring that many riders will be using it as a tune-up for the UCI Road World Championships in early October. This year’s mixed course of sprint days, time trials and mini-Classics days means that a wide field has a good chance of usurping the throne of consecutive winner Tim Wellens (Belgium/Lotto-Soudal).

Stage 1 is one for the sprinters that starts and ends in Bolsward, the Netherlands, although the prospect of coastal winds might not make it so straightforward. The next day is a 9.6-km time trial in Breda. Wednesday is another sprint day with a tricky finishing circuit.

Stage 4 is the first mini-Classics stage, this one taking in some of the cobbles and hills of the Flemish Classics Brabantse Pijl and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. The next day is the first team time trial since 2012, a big warped figure-8 in the Netherlands and Germany of 20.9-km.

The final two stages are both mini-Classics, with Stage 6 a mini-Amstel Gold/Liege-Bastogne-Liege culminating on a kilometre of 3% uphill. The final stage is the queen stage, a tough affair which has three finishing circuits each containing four hellingen that conclude on the dreaded Muur in Geraardsbergen.

The sprinter depth, with Doha, Qatar in mind, is considerable. Mark Cavendish, Andre Greipel, Marcel Kittel, Nacer Bouhanni, Fernando Gaviria, Caleb Ewan and Elia Viviani will vie for Stage 1 and 3 honours. Perhaps to their advantage is innovative “golden kilometre”, three intermediate sprints within a single kilometre where a rider could score a total of 9 bonus seconds, with 3, 2 and 1 second being on offer for the first three riders across the line in each sprint.

Another type of rider is the favourite for the all-around crown: one who can time trial and contest those Classics stages. Two who stand out are Peter Sagan (Slovakia/Tinkoff) and Greg van Avermaet (Belgium/BMC), who recently took turns at winning the WorldTour Laurentian Classics in the province of Quebec. When Sagan won the GP de Quebec, Olympic gold medalist Van Avermaet was runner up, when Van Avermaet took the GP de Montreal title, World Champion Sagan was second.

The time trials will suit Dutchman Tom Dumoulin (Giant-Alpecin), Rohan Dennis (Australia/BMC) and Etixx-QuickStep rider Niki Terpstra (The Netherlands).

Other riders with a shout are Movistar’s Jon Izagirre (Spain), recent Mr. Consistency at the Vuelta Fabio Felline (Italy/Trek-Segafredo) and Australian Michael Matthews (Orica-BikeExchange), who is off to Giant-Alpecin (Sunweb-Giant) next season.

The lone Canadian at this year’s Eneco Tour is Hugo Houle (AG2R).