It will be a Tour of Hainan as competitive as never before that will start tomorrow from the capital of the island, Haikou. At the start of the brief Chinese stage race, which this year is in its 17th edition, there will indeed be ten professional teams, including two World Tour and eight ProTeam, a figure never recorded at the starting line of the Asian race, and for the first time in their history, Caja Rural-Seguros RGA, MBH Bank CSB Telecom Fort and Lotto Intermarché have decided to participate in this edition.

The latter will be, together with XDS Astana (accustomed for years to racing on Chinese stages), the only representative of the top series and, as such, one of the teams on which the greatest attention will be placed by both other competitors in the race and by those working on site. To meet expectations, the Belgian team will seek to have its say on every front, aiming for the general classification with Baptiste Veistroffer and for partial victories with the speed of Stefan De Schuyteneer and a man who in China has already imposed himself in sprints in the past like Lionel Taminiaux.

In the sprints, however, the two Belgians will have their work cut out to get their wheel ahead of very competitive and qualified opposition where the names of sprinters already successful this season stand out, such as Matteo Malucelli (XDS Astana), Iuri Leitao (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA), Dusan Rajovic (Solution Tech NIPPO Rali), Nicolò Buratti (MBH Bank CSB Telecom Fort) and Alexander Salby (Li Ning Star), and others who, on the contrary, are still hungry for their first success in 2026 like Enrico Zanoncello (Bardiani CSF 7 Saber), Cristian David Pita (Roojai Insurance Winspace), Mihkel Raim (Quick Pro Team), Norman Vahtra (China Anta - Mentech Cycling Team), Eduard-Michael Grosu (FNIX - SCOM - Hengxiang Cycling Team), Paul Hennequin (Euskaltel-Euskadi) and a man who knows how to win at these latitudes like Petr Rikunov (Wheeltop Rotor Chengdu Team).

For the fast finishes, therefore, the competition promises to be as tight and thrilling as possible, but there is reason to believe that the battle for the yellow jersey, won last year by Kyrylo Tsarenko thanks to his winning move in the final of the third stage with finish in Baoting, will be no less intense. The Ukrainian, as we have already had the opportunity to report in recent weeks, will not be able to defend the title he won in 2025 due to some bureaucratic issues, but his team, Solution Tech NIPPO Rali, will still try to achieve a repeat by relying on the pair Matteo Fabbro-Santiago Umba who, in the stages most suited to climbers, will seek to make their climbing abilities count.

Alongside them, it is very likely that the two will find themselves battling with Filippo Magli (third at Hainan two years ago), old World Tour acquaintances like Merhawi Kudus, Vadim Pronskiy (first at the last Tour of Thailand) and Eduardo Sepulveda (who joined Li Ning Star this year after three seasons at Lotto), but also athletes who on a course like the one designed this year by the organizers could find suitable terrain to excel like Sebastian Berwick (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA), Jordi Lopez (Euskaltel-Euskadi), Thomas Pesenti (making his absolute debut in China), Alessandro Fancellu (MBH Bank CSB Telecom Fort), the fresh Oceania champion Carter Bettles (Roojai Insurance Winspace) and the winner of the 2021 Giro del Friuli Jonas Rapp.

To these profiles must then be added that of the one who, probably, can be considered the main favorite for the overall victory, namely Guillermo Silva, who, after coming close last year to winning the Tour of Qinghai and closing the season with 4 victories, will start with the clear intention of giving XDS Astana (a team that, for sponsorship reasons, is very keen to shine during this week of racing) a general classification victory that, one way or another, has eluded them since 2016 when Aleksei Lutsenko triumphed.

To break this curse, the Kazakh team has chosen to support the former Uruguayan champion with a very solid lineup that, with Gustav Wang, Nicolas Vinokourov, Haoyu Su, Lev Gonov and Matteo Scalco, will provide the twenty-four-year-old South American with the necessary support to give substance to his aggressive intentions for this week of racing.

The young Italian rider, recently second at the Palio del Recioto and even earlier victorious at the Tour of Rhodes, will be one of the 22 Italians who will make up the second most numerous Italian contingent in the history of the Tour of Hainan: from Haikou, indeed, along with him and the already mentioned Malucelli, Fabbro, Zanoncello and Buratti, will also start Fausto Masnada (one of the three Italians, and the last one, to claim the yellow jersey here in 2018), Cristian Bagatin, Matteo Ambrosin, Samuele Zoccarato (MBH Bank CSB Telecom Fort), Tommaso Bessega (Polti VisitMalta), Luca Colnaghi, Alessio Martinelli, Andrea Montagner, Manuele Tarozzi, Filippo Turconi (Bardiani CSF 7 Saber), Riccardo Lucca (Quick Pro Team), Alessandro Iacchi (Solution tech NIPPO Rali) and young riders who may well achieve some satisfaction along the way like Lorenzo Quartucci (in the top ten in the standings in both 2023 and 2024) and Alexander Konychev (China Anta - Mentech Cycling Team), capable of winning in Greece a month ago.