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Thibaut Pinot He will pass the Tour de France in 2021 and focus his efforts on the Giro d’Italia. According Cyclingnews, the Frenchman wants to relieve himself this year from the pressure of running the big one in his country, in which he has had more than one mishap.
Groupama-FDJ, his team, are scheduled to make the season’s agenda and goals public at a public conference on Tuesday. And in principle it will be the Corsa Rosa and not the Grande Boucle that will appear marked in red on the Frenchman’s roadmap.
The truth is that the route of the next edition of the Tour, which will include two times and fewer high finishes than on other occasions, does not favor him. And also in recent years it has become an ordeal for him: in 2019 a muscle injury forced him to leave and last year he suffered a hard fall in the first stage from which he could not recover.
The route of the Giro, which has not yet been revealed, aims instead to be more conducive to pure climbers like him. It is a race in which he has already participated (he was fourth in 2017) and in which he is not required as much as in front of his compatriots.
With his absence, the main assets of the FDJ in the Tour point to being the sprinter Démare and the young Gaudu. At the Giro Pinot he could face riders like Vincenzo Nibali, Remco Evenepoel, Simon Yates or the defender of the pink jersey, Tao Geoghegan Hart, in the general classification.