Julian Alaphilippe returns to racing at Clásica San Sebastián after Olympics absence
The world champion chose not to race in Tokyo 2020 after the Tour de France
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World champion, Julian Alaphilippe will make his return to racing at the Clásica San Sebastián this weekend after taking a short break following the Tour de France.
The Deceuninck - Quick-Step star will be leading his squad at the race around the Basque Country's regional capital of San Sebastian, otherwise known as Donostia.
This is an important race that is part of the UCI WorldTour calendar and a potential build-up to the final Grand Tour of the year, the Vuelta a España.
Deceuninck - Quick-Step have won the last two runnings of this race with Alapilippe taking victory in 2018 and young Belgian star Remco Evenepoel winning in 2019. The 2020 edition was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In a team press release, sports director Wilfried Pieters said: "San Sebastian is always a hard race, everybody knows that. You’ve got a lot of climbing and an extremely tough ascent inside the last 10 kilometres, which since it has been added to the course, it’s been decisive almost every single time.
"But we have a solid team, built around a former winner of the race, and we go there with the confidence that we can get a good result at the end of the day."
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Alaphilippe will be supported by Mattia Cattaneo, who has just come off the back of a 12th place overall at the Tour, along with James Knox, Zdeněk Štybar, Mikkel Honoré, Pieter Serry and Dries Devenyns in what is a very solid team.
Riders will have to tackle 223.5km of racing taking on six categorised climbs including the famous Jaiskibel, an 8km ascent, as well as the final climb of the Murgil-Tontorra which is 2.1km at an average of 10.1 per cent gradient.
The race starts and finishes in San Sebastian with the race going in and out of the city throughout the race before finishing on the seafront boulevard next to the popular beach. It takes place on Saturday, July 31 on the same day as the much shorter women's event which is going to be racing its third edition of the event.
Tim Bonville-Ginn is a freelance writer who has worked with Cycling Weekly since 2020 and has also written for many of the biggest publications in cycling media including Cyclingnews, Rouleur, Cyclist and Velo.