Defending champion Benoît Cosnefroy of AG2R Citroën Team suffered a knee injury in training in mid-January and was forced to miss the race, but his teammate and French compatriot Aurélien Paret-Peintre won the race. The peloton was reduced to a small group of around 30 riders at the finish, and in the ensuing bunch sprint, Paret-Peintre, not generally known for his sprinting prowess, narrowly beat sprinters Thomas Boudat and Bryan Coquard in a photo finish.[2][3]
Teams
Seven UCI WorldTeams, eight UCI ProTeams, and two UCI Continental teams make up the seventeen teams that were invited to the race. Each team entered with seven riders, making up a 119-rider peloton. Of these riders, there were 110 finishers. Four riders finished over the time limit, while a further four did not finish the race. The only non-starter, Jonas Rutsch of EF Education–Nippo, was a late scratch after receiving a positive result from a routine COVID-19 test.[4][5][6]
