Do not sacrifice sleep for breakfast. The purpose of a pre-race meal is to top off liver glycogen stores. Assuming you had a proper recovery meal after your last workout, then fueled properly the day and night before, muscle glycogen remains intact overnight. During sleep, your liver-stored glycogen maintains a proper blood glucose level and you expend near to none of your muscle glycogen.
You might wake up feeling hungry, but you’ll have a full supply of muscle-stored glycogen. Your stomach and mind might be telling you “I’m hungry, need food for a big race!”, but your muscles are ready to go. Hunger is not a performance inhibitor and you can, and should, begin fueling as soon as you start the race.
However, if you eat within a couple hours, one can expect negative effects on performance because it doesn’t allow enough time for adequate digestion, absorption and the blood glucose regulation system to normalize. Eating too close to the start of the race can cause the following; rapidly elevated blood sugar causing excess insulin release leading to an abnormally low level of glucose in the blood; high insulin levels inhibit lipid mobilization during aerobic exercise, which means reduced fats to fuels conversion; and high insulin level will induce blood sugar into muscle cells, which increases the rate of carbohydrate metabolism, which means rapid carbohydrate fuel depletion.
This is the general concensus on fueling for longer events. Plenty of people will say they eat 1 or 2 hours before and it has “worked” for them. But what their saying is that what they did or do allows for adequate time for digestion and they have no stomach distress or poop issues. Which is great, but it doesn’t mean they’re optimizing their nutrition pre-race. Their is a great deal of varying opinions on what nutrition is best when you actually eat on the bike, but that is something you’ll have to experiment with for yourself and that’s a whole different discussion.