DURING THE STAGE
1 km to go
Pogacar goes alone and wins the stage.
4 km to go
Pogacar attacks with 4,6 km to go. Vingegaard and Evenepoel following him from a distance. at 4,3 Pogacar joins the Yates-Healy duo, and this is the moment whenJealy's dreams die. Also Vingegaard and Evenepoel leafe him behind very soon.
5 km to go
As the UAE Team Emirates shook up the race with the attack of Adam Yates, now the reduced peloton is led by the Visma, more preciesely by Matteo Jorgenson.
7 km to go
Adam Yates attacks from the peloton. Clearly not for himself but to prepeare a bigger attack woul be orchestrated by Pogacar. But Yates definit3lly shook up the race.
8 km to go
Healy has 20 seconds. Now Joao Almeida leads the yellow jersey group.
10 km to go
Ben Healy attacks at the beginning of Pla d'Adet. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but he attacked right after Kwiatkowski dropped from this group. It looks like Gaudu is the only one tries to catch up.
In the group of the favourites Soler drops, Pavel Sicakov is the new pace-maker.
15 km to go
Actually, I expected the breakaway rider will be caught by jow, but they slightly increased their advantage instead. Nevertheless they will be caught anyway very soon.
28 km to
History repeated itself. Almost. Gaudu was more cautious and more eager and now he outsprinted Lazkano.
Amazing that the reduced peloton is only a little bit more than one minute behind them.
30 km to go
Onl five riders left from the original breakaway group: Gaudu, Lazkano, Meinjes, Michal Kwiatkosk and Ben Healy. Menawhile Marc Soler accelerated the pace in the peloton? They are coming closer and closer.
34 km to go
Nils Politt end his workday, now comes Marc Soler. He is setting the pace at the front of the peloton. I'm curious how this will effect the dynamics of the race. Tadey Pogacar has 4, Jonas Vingegaard has only 2 teammates.
35 km to go
Welcome to Horquette de Ancizan. There is still 7 km to go to the top. Gaudu and Lazkano are the most active riders again.
Mathieu van der Poel drops from the breakaway group. To me it sounds a bit impossible that he really tried to win this stage because of the family connection, but the British commentators are quite sure of it that this was his aim today.
62 km to go
With 700 m before the top of the Tourmalet, David Gaudu launches an attack, but Lazkano follows, surprises and outspints him. Meanwhile the peloton comes a bit closer. The gap between the breakaway group and the peloton is around 3 and a half minutes.
74 km to go
It took only 5 or 6 km for the sprinters rode ahead a bit of the peloton for the spint points to slip back to the main bunch or even drop of it and stsrt forming the gruppetto.
It's worth mentioning that the peloton keeps its distance permanently around 4 minutes, which indicates, that they don't want to see a breakaway victory today. The UAE Team Emirates leading the main group, Nils Politt is setting the pace.
80 km to go
After the sprint. Here comes Tourmalet.
From the point of view of someone who writes awful lot about road cycling history, Tourmalet is always a grateful topic. But I noticed, when it comes to writing about a current stage in our modern time including Tourmalet is not always easy. Despite the big myrh, the legend, because it is often a mid-stage ascent, the peloton goes throught i uneventfully.
96 km to go
If the other would join the front bunch too, there will be an at least 20-man breakaway goup. Nevertheless, it looks like everything is settled. There is a breakaways group wich is OK for the teams of the main favourites. Some of them seems they are here only for the intermediate sprint right before Tourmalet.
100km to go
Since a few km we have an interesting quartet with Arnaud De Lie, Mathieau van der Poel, Brian Coquard and Cendric Beullens. Then we have somewhere between this group and the peloton at leas one other quartet. They have just joined the front group. The four riders i. this group is Lazkano, Vauqelin, Garcia Piema and Marcus Cort Nielsen.
123 km to go
The duo of Victor Campenaert and Brian Coquard seems a good idea. Nope. I wasn't.
128 km to go
Certainly, this will be one of those days, when the breakaway group of the stage would form quite slowly. Yesterday was a very fast day, but as later the group establishes the more possible that today, despite theee mighty mountains will be a fast day either. In a bit more sarcastic mood, I should say, there is still plenty of time to form a breakaway group. The real ride starts somewhere at 80 km to go, or so, right before Tourmalet.
