Ineos Grenadiers will field a Giro d'Italia team leader at next week's Tour of the Alps, with Geraint Thomas, Tao Geoghegan Hart, Pavel Sivakov, and Timen Arensmann in the five-day stage race in Austria and Italy will participate in.

Remco Evenpoel will be in Belgium for Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and Primoz Roglic will miss the pre-Giro races, but Ineos Grenadiers will always use the Tour of the Alps mountain route as an important final race before Corsa Rosa

Thomas M.

Thomas won the Tour de Alps in 2017, Sivakov and Geoghegan Hart are first and second in 2019, and Allenman finished third last year while riding for Team DSM and overall winner Romain Bardet.

Other notables this year include Jack Hague (Bahrain Victorious), Hugh Kersee (EF Education Easy Post), Ivan Sosa (Movistar), Joe Dombrowski (Astana Kazakstan), Chris Froome (Israel Premier Tech), and Bora Hansgrohe's Leonard Kemna and Alexander Vlasov.

"The Tour of the Alps is a great place to see how the riders are doing," said Matteo Tosat, director sportif of Ineos Grenadier, who will lead the team in the Tour of the Alps and the Giro d'Italia.

"In the last few years, riders who have won stages and the overall at the Tour de Alps have often been the focus of attention at the Giro d'Italia.

"It will be a very competitive lineup in terms of determining the team representatives for the Giro d'Italia. Everyone will be coming back from high altitude training." They will start with ambition to win.

Also among the expected Ineos Grenadiers are road captain Salvatore Puccio, Lawrence De Plus, and Ben Swift.

Thomas will travel straight from his high altitude training camp in the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain to Austria for the Tour of the Alps. He may not be Ineos Grenadier's protected leader in this race, as he suffered several infections early in the season.

"We will decide with him stage by stage," Tosat explained. Geoghegan Hart and Arensman will go for the overall, and so will Sivakov. It's a winnable race, and we can plan different strategies."

The 2023 Tour of the Alps starts in Rattenberg, Austria, on Monday, with an uphill finish in Alpbach, and ends in Brunico on Friday. Stage 3 finishes on the 15.5km summit of San Valentino overlooking Lake Garda, and stage 4 to Predazzo is just 152km of racing with 3610m of climbing.

"The first stage is beautiful, but not too hard and suited for the Tao Geoghegan Hart," Tosat suggested.

"But the hardest stage is definitely the third, with a very tough final climb that requires good legs and may have race-defining gaps.