After the race started, a group of nine riders immediately chose to break away.
But unlike Flèche Wallonne and the Amstel Gold Race, in this kind of top-tier one-day race, the breakaway riders were predominantly from World Tour Teams.
After all, the breakaway group gets a considerable amount of camera time for the first two-thirds of the race.
For many of the lower-ranked World Tour Teams, the main reason for participating is to advertise for the team.
They don't really have any ambitions for the final general classification.
But in a race watched by a global audience, both the teams and their sponsors know that having a rider in the live broadcast for five or six hours is far more cost-effective than spending millions of euros on a few dozen seconds of primetime advertising.
