Tour des Alpes-Maritimes 2025 Stage 1

February 22, 2025 It's a grueling stage with 3,500M of elevation gain over 162KM and four categorized climbs. The riders will climb the 14KM Col de Gourdon, hit the finish line with around 26KM to go, then do a loop around to take on Col de Gourdon once again. A little drizzle of rain came down and would follow the riders throughout the day, and with the temperature hovering around 10C (50F), it would not feel like a typical early Spring day in Provence. Six riders made the break of the day including Baptiste Veistroffer of Lotto, Edoardo Zamperini of Arkéa-B&B Hotels, Mattéo Vercher of TotalEnergies, Sergio Meris of Unibet-Tietema Rockets, Morné Van Niekerk of St.Michel-Preference Home-Auber 93, and Kenny Molly of Van Rysel Roubaix. Their lead was just 90 seconds with 64KM to go with EF-Education EasyPost chasing behind. With 54KM to go, Vercher reached in his back pocket for food but he hit a hole in the road at the same time. He hit the ground pretty hard but somehow got himself together and caught back with the rest of the break just as they started the Col de Gourdon for the first time at just over 44KM to go. His time in the front would be short lived however because EF-Education EasyPost continued to ride hard and caught the break with 35KM to go. There were around 45 riders still in contention over the top. Andrea Vendrame of Decathlon AG2R was not content to sit in for the last climb so he attacked on the gradual downhill with 19KM to go. He had a maximum gap of 30 seconds but EF-Education EasyPost was not going to let the win go up the road so easily and they brought Vendrame back with 8KM to go. The pace was ramping up and the first attack came from Santiago Buitrago of Bahrain Victorious with 6.7KM to go. The move drew out Richard Carapaz of EF-Education EasyPost, Christian Scaroni of XDS-Astana, and Buitrago's teammate, Lenny Martinez. Carapaz was dropped just under 6KM from the line and fell back to a group containing Lorenzo Fortunato of XDS-Astana, Aurélien Paret-Peintre of Decathlon AG2R, Guillaume Martin of Groupama-FDJ, Joseph Blackmore of Israel-Premier Tech, and Jarno Widar of Lotto. Instead of trying to attack Scaroni, Bahrain Victorious decided to sit Martinez on the front and pull the gap out to the chasers. With 2KM to go, the gap was 38 seconds which was too much for the chase group to overcome. Martinez kept the pace high until 175M to go when Scaroni attacked. Scaroni took the final turn in the last 75M wide which forced Buitrago out. Scaroni was able to stay ahead of Buitrago by half a wheel on the line to take the victory, Buitrago settled for second with Martinez coming in 4 seconds later. Fortunato led the chase group in 47 seconds down and likely out of the GC picture with just 1 stage remaining.