Key events
80km to go. Sam Bass writes in with a cycling-based board game recommendation. I must have it!
With you on finding Carcassonne (the board game) a bit of a churn. I can however – as the owner of 100+ board games – recommend Flamme Rouge to you and perhaps readers of this blog who enjoy a little organised fun. It’s not your traditional dice-chucking, luck-based race game. It’s simple yet deceptively smart card play, charmingly mimicks race conditions like eating wind and slipstreaming. Especially fun when someone ‘bonks’ having wasted their high energy cards too early.
Been enjoying your writing this TdF! It’s been keeping me company on these slow summer days.
82km to go. The break is on the second-category Col de Coudons. More like cauldron today, with precious little shade. Vacek and Tratnik have drifted off the front, with a lead of 15 seconds.
Green jersey points in the bag, Girmay and Philipsen have sat up and are dropping back to the bunch – which is still being led by UAE Team Emirates-XRG worker Nils Politt. Earning his keep this afternoon.
85km to go. Transpires there was a earlier error in my email address, it should be corrected now.
Hopes, thoughts, predictions, Seixasmania, cassoulet tips and tangents can be sent to the address linked above or andy.mcgrath.casual@guardian.co.uk
Girmay wins the intermediate sprint
89km to go. Through the sprint at Quillan, the Eritrean is best of the fast men, pipping Jasper Philipsen and Mads Pedersen.
Their group’s gap is up to 4min 30secs. By the way, Torsten Træen (Uno-X Mobility) is the best-placed rider in the group, 5min 6secs behind Pogacar. Sean Quinn (EF Education-EasyPost) is 5min 34secs down too. If their lead keeps rising, they will be thinking that the yellow jersey is a possibility, not just a stage win.
117km to go. The beefy break goes up and over the third-category Col du Paradis, Alex Molenaar outsprinting Michael Valgren to take two King of the Mountains points. Their advantage? 3 mins 5secs.
The camera rest briefly on Decathlon CMA CGM Team leader Paul Seixas. How do you think the much-touted French teenager will do at the Tour? Or will someone else be the revelation of this race? Let me know and have a read of Jeremy Whittle’s pre-race piece about him while I pop out for some grub:
124km to go. It is absolutely baking out there in the Aude, temperatures of 36 degrees Celsius. Not very fun under that sun.
Riders stay calm, cool and collected by spraying themselves with water from their bottles, having slushies and stuffing ice socks down their jerseys. (Not actual foot socks). Soigneurs must have been working overtime cramming cooler boxes with goodies.
130km to go. Alex Molenaar (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) goes over the fourth-category Col des Bedos first.
UAE Team Emirates-XRG strongman Nils Politt, he of the incandescent teeth – Geraint Thomas once called him the “Flying Dentist” on a podcast – and dynamite legs, has ridden on the front for the last half an hour, taking the bunch’s deficit down to 3mins 19 secs.
135km to go. TNT Sports comms chatting away about cassoulet. Since my first Tours on the grounds over 15 years ago, my colleagues were delighted about being in Occitanie because we could chow down on this regional dish, and they passed on that appreciation.
Beans, sausages, bacon, duck, goose, mutton, chicken legs in a sizzling hot pot: it is a hearty, delicious dish for a warm winter’s day. Not what you want during a sizzling summer and no riders will be tucking in. Still, for fans and the press pack, when in Rome Carcassonne…
140km to go. Stage start town Carcassonne is also a board game, all about building a road network and landscape. Have to say I found it very dull the one time I played it, perhaps the flaw was only having two of us. It’s no Catan.
148km to go. Seventeen of the Tour’s 23 teams are represented in this mega-escape, in with a chance. Their lead is 3mins 45secs.
Two of the squad missing out – UAE and Visma-Lease a Bike – are leading the bunch, only too happy to look after their superstar leaders. Decathlon CMA CGM Team, XDS Astana and Tudor are the others to miss out, their riders probably getting an earful over race radio by annoyed sport directors.
Large breakaway escapes
155km to go. The peloton fans across the road, happy for some let-up in the action. Rider after rider attacked, making it a 34-strong super-group. A fair few too many riders to be particularly cohesive, I’d wager.
The biggest names up the road? Former world champ Mads Pedersen, Jasper Stuyven, sprint star Jasper Philipsen, four-time Tour stage winner Michael Matthews, Biniam Girmay and French champion Romain Grégoire.
The full rundown of escapees (surnames only or I’ll be here all day): Pedersen, Simmons, Vacek, Quinn, Valgren, Steinhauser, Denz, Tratnik, Vauquelin, Van Mechelen, Stannard, Stuyven, Eenkhoorn, Philipsen, Debruyne, Planckaert, Matthews, Træen, Girmay, Frigo, Zimmermann, Izagirre, Kirsch, Castrillo, Oliveira, Garcia Pierna, Gregoire, Costiou, Delettre, Hermans, Van Moer, Molenaar, Nicolau and, last but not least, Van den Broeck.
165km to go. You can see interesting micro-dynamics in every attack. A UAE rider shoots off up the road, followed seconds later by an eagle-eyed Visma-Lease a Bike man. The teams of the two protagonists do not want the other to have an upper hand.
Two Netcompany Ineos riders give it a go. The team formerly known as Sky, which used to dominate the Tour, will be stage hunting this summer. 2018 winner Geraint Thomas is their Director of Racing in the backroom.
174km to go. 14 riders have gone up the road, including Jasper Stuyven and Mads Pedersen, but the chase is on.
No ITV coverage also means no goosebump-inducing theme tune. Enjoy it one more time:
Evidently a British viewer, Glenn Macdonald-Jones writes in, pulling no punches about the free-to-air highlights.
The post race analysis on Ch 5 is much weaker than the ITV4 used to be because it’s non-existent. Dreadful.
Off we go!
181km to go. The peloton passes kilometre zero after a long neutralised roll-out of Carcassonne. Remco Evenepoel had a flat tyre in that section: the best moment to have one, no chance of losing ground.
There is going to be an almighty scrap to be in the day’s breakaway. The day’s first attacker is US champion Quinn Simmons (Lidl-Trek).
Doyen of cycling journalism William Fotheringham reckons this could be a stage for veteran campaigners Michal Kwiatkowski or Magnus Cort. You can read his team-by-team guide here:
Yorkshire’s Tom Pidcock on the temperatures yesterday: “I don’t think I’ve done such a hard race in such heat before, it was ridiculous. Like a warzone.”
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The stage rolls out of Carcassonne in five minutes’ time. With its cobbled streets and crenellations which could have been drawn by a child, the fairytale fortified French city is unsurprisingly popular with tourists.
I’ve fond memories of it too: I watched England muller Panama 6-1 in the 2018 World Cup in a bar there. Jesse Lingard’s last goal for England, maybe?
Pogacar and Vingegaard may be on the exact same time overall, but the Slovenian struck an early psychological blow yesterday. UAE Team Emirates-XRG seized the race by the scruff of the neck when there was no real need to jump into action.
The distance he put into his rivals in a 300-metre sprint was very impressive. He looks imperious, ominous before the tougher mountain stages.
As Jeremy Whittle noted in his report, Pogacar’s 22nd Tour stage win fuelled talk of him closing further on Mark Cavendish’s win record of 35 but the Slovene batted away the suggestion. “It’s still far away,” he said.
“Maybe today was my last victory ever. I prefer to stay in the moment and enjoy this victory. I don’t want to think about Mark’s record. Just go with the flow.”
No big names have fallen out of contention yet, but an outsider under-performing yesterday was spellcheck-upsetting Cian Uijtdebroeks. The Movistar captain finished a minute behind Pogacar and also suffered cramps in the race-opening TTT.
The debutant, touted as a possible grand tour star a few years ago, is already 3min 24secs down on the sport’s Slovenian slayer. Ouch.
Breakfast news: we are also in south-west France, the part where they call a pain au chocolat a chocolatine. There are even bits of the nation, way out east, which call the delicious pastry a petit pain au chocolat.
A minefield for any suspecting tourist blithely walking into the local boulangerie.
Preamble
Through Cathar and cassoulet country we go for the 2026 Tour de France’s first fully French stage. It covers a lumpy 181.9km from splendorous Carcassonne to Foix over four categorised climbs.
There is not quite as much climbing on the menu as yesterday, but it will be even hotter, with temperatures expected to be reaching 40 degrees Celsius. Ah, the sweaty reality of a modern Tour taking place in July during the climate crisis.
Riders will be getting through water bottles into double figures and using ice socks down the back of their necks. Stage three winner and new race leader, Tadej Pogačar, has done plenty of heat training, but believes racing in the heat is “dangerous” if you don’t keep your body temperature down.
“It’s a logistic nightmare when it’s hot like today,” Pogačar said yesterday. “As a team, we really start to put a lot of effort into this … we have to bring so much water and ice to the riders. Three guys go back to the car to bring bottles and ice to keep cooling yourself.”
The sport’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) has tweaked rules, authorising the use of feed bags in zones initially defined for the provision of bottles only on categorised climbs ie. racers can also carry water bottles in their musettes. Every little helps.
After three stages putting Tour de France contenders to the fore, this should be one for the breakaways. Okay, I said the same 24 hours ago and UAE Team Emirates-XRG proved me wrong, but I’m even more adamant today.
The Col de Montségur, topped 35km from the finish, will be a likely launchpad for stage-winning attacks.
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Contenders, then. A day like this will pique the interest of a range of riders: British champion Fred Wright (Pinarello-Q36.5) has already noted his interest to media. This medium-mountain day will also suit Julian Alaphilippe (Tudor) and Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost), perhaps a quick, resilient sprinter who can climb well like Michael Matthews (Jayco Alula) or Alex Aranburu (Cofidis). And then there is always awe-inspiring Monument man Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech?)…
Got Pogi fatigue yet? Enjoying Channel 5’s highlights coverage in the UK? Send over your Tour thoughts, predictions, quips, questions and tangents to me here or on Bluesky.
