Remco Evenepoel is clearly the man to beat in stage five. The Olympic and world time trial champion was superb at the Dauphine where he took 20 seconds out of Jonas Vingegaard and was 48 seconds ahead of Tadej Pogacar. And with no Filippo Ganna or Stefan Bissegger after their stage one crashes it is hard to look beyond the big three.

Tour de France continues on Friday with Stage 7, a 197 km trek through Brittany featuring rolling terrain and a dramatic finish at Mûr-de-Bretagne.

A three-week Grand Tour will always contain natural ebbs and flows, and, for much of Monday’s stage between Valenciennes and Dunkirk, it looked as if the peloton had declared an unofficial rest day, with the riders happy to cruise back towards the coast after a weekend of wind, rain and intensity.

If riders were hoping for a relaxing stage 2 to recuperate then they may be disappointed: today’s stage is the longest of the entire Tour, 209km from the small village of Lauwin-Planque to Boulogne-sur-Mer on the northern coast of France.