One of the most frequent complaints about bike racing is that it’s too choreographed. Everyone from Mike Creed to Oleg Tinkov has made the complaint that vast sections of every race are really, really dull. 
This observation, like everything else in cycling is massively and detrimentally Tour de France-specific. Even with the ludicrous distances they broadcast (180km!), the classics seldom have a wasted moment.
 There’s a lot behind this—one-day events eliminate the need to hedge against GC losses, there’s no accumulated fatigue from successive days of racing, there are constant pinch points, corners, steep hills, narrow, cobblestoned roads, etc.
 But for me, the most important aspect of the classics is that when the race is really shaking out, there are moments when absolutely no one knows what’s going on. Not the commentators, not the racers, not the directors—no one. You could have four choppers and a dozen motos and still not get enough viewpoints to assemble a coherent race situation in the moment.
 It’s like the thrill of a broken play in football, except that it resolves in minutes, not seconds, forcing dozens of individual actors to make high-value decisions based on utterly incomplete information. Needing a wheel change at the Tour is perfunctory; getting one at Roubaix is a crisis of gut-turning frenzy.
 For me the question isn’t whether the Tour de France should integrate aspects of the classics, but why it doesn’t have more of them, and why they are consistently relegated to the first week.

 The sense that 30 minutes on Alpe d’Huez is somehow more significant than 30 seconds on Carrefour de l’Arbre is both wrong, and a surefire recipe for ensuring the only three weeks of cycling anyone outside of Belgium cares about are dull as shit.