The first road stage climbed the Montjuïc circuit three times, and UAE rode it like a team that had already decided the race was theirs. Brandon McNulty tore the front group to shreds, Tiesj Benoot lifted the pace until Mathieu van der Poel cracked, and Adam Yates delivered Pogacar to the foot of the final rise. When Pogacar launched he plainly had the legs to win — and instead sat up and gifted the stage to his young teammate Isaac del Toro. Remco Evenepoel took third, Vingegaard fourth, all on the same time.
Up the road, Alex Molenaar had spent the day making the breakaway pay — first over the Côte de Bégues for the mountain points and first across the intermediate sprint at Viladecans — while behind him the fast men scrapped for the minor placings. Clément Berthet never started, a concussion from the Stage 1 crash making him the Tour’s first abandon.
Chris takes over on top with 69, a 49-point Stage 2 led by Jonas Vingegaard (+18). And Scoring v2 bared its teeth: the intermediate sprint, the climb points and the new teammate bonus all paid out for the first time — del Toro’s win alone handed a quiet +2 to every drafted UAE rider on the road (Tadej Pogacar, Tim Wellens).
In a plot only Kirk could write, the man who ran the draft sits dead last in his own league. He scraped 16 on Stage 2 (Lenny Martinez +8, Tom Pidcock +6, Mads Pedersen +2) and it still wasn’t enough. The seed was fair, we are assured; the results, less merciful.
The full draw — method, seeds and every squad — lives under the “The Draft” tab; the scoring rules, including the three new lanes, are on the Rules tab.
How it worked. From the roughly 184 starters, a curated pool of eighty draftable riders — the ones with a realistic shot at points — was ranked and split into four scoring tiers. A fixed seed of 777 set a random draft order, then a ten-round snake ran (the order reverses each round). The first three rounds are specialty rounds: every squad drafts a GC leader, then a sprinter, then a climber, so everyone lands a marquee name in each discipline. The remaining seven rounds are best-available. Same seed, same draft, every time.
Draft order: Mark → Chris → Stephen → Matthew → Kirk.
Scoring rewards the brave: stage, sprint, climb, teammate and jersey points are all flat, but the big end-of-Tour bonuses are multiplied by rider tier (T1 ×1.0 up to T4 ×2.0). A domestique who steals a stage or sneaks into the top ten pays out double. Depth and daring both count.