Stage 8 | Saturday, 6 July | Semur-en-Auxois - Colombey-les-deux-Eglises | 183.4 kilometres | 2400 vertical metres
Rolf Aldag's assessment of stage 8: Who controls the race?
Now I'm heading into the hilly centre of France and towards a significant destination, because Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises is where the life of the war hero and founder of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle, ended in 1970. After three days of rather manageable spectacle, at least on paper, I'm expecting a wild ride here. Clearly, a stage with so many changes of direction and rhythm is very suitable for breakaways.
After a week in the race, many teams have already experienced enough disappointments and plans have been thrown overboard, so that they should now be aiming for stage wins and still have suitable candidates on the bus. This won't make it any easier for the sprinters' teams to control the stage, and here too it depends on who is riding in green. In this respect, we should expect an animated race and give the breakaways a realistic chance, although I'm expecting more of a sprint finale.
That depends on how many breakaway riders make it into the final as a group. If there are three of them, it will hardly be enough. If there are seven or eight riders, the chances increase considerably. A sprint for powerhouses like Jasper Philipsen or Mads Pedersen seems more likely to me. Because despite the five mountain classifications, we must not overlook them: It's still more than 16 kilometres from the last really tough climb to the finish.
Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of stage 8 of the Tour de France 2024
- Neutral start: 13:05, sharp start 13:20
- Estimated arrival time: between 17:19 and 17:42
- TV broadcast: ARD 14:00 - 17:35, Eurosport 12:45 - 17:30
- Live stream: ARD one, sportschau.de, GCN+, Discovery+, Eurosport
- All stages of the Tour de France 2024 at a glance
- All info on TV broadcast & live stream
- The start list
- The regulations
The 8th stage of the Tour de France 2024 in the live ticker
TOUR expert Rolf Aldag
As a racer with a great overview, Rolf Aldag was a bank for successful Tour teams and supported Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich in their victories in France. As a sports manager and sporting director, the Westphalian is also one of the most respected representatives in the industry. He is also planning the Tour de France mission again in 2024 with the newly named Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team. As in previous years, Aldag has once again analysed this year's Tour exclusively for the readers of TOUR.
The 55-year-old has looked at the dramaturgy of the route planners and gone into detail to assess the possible course of the individual stages. In this work, he reflects on which constellations are likely in the race and which riders are likely to have particular hopes - or worries - on which stages. He also includes his view on innovations and trends in the business. In addition, Aldag provides a compact overview of the relevance of the respective stage for which classification. He assigns zero to three jerseys per classification: for the overall classification (yellow jersey), the points classification for the best sprinters (green jersey) and the Tour's mountain classification (dotted jersey). In this way, Rolf Aldag's forecast offers added value every day.
Newsletter - TOUR Tech-Briefing
TOUR analysiert zur Tour de France das Material der Teams und gibt exklusiv eine Einschätzung zu Rädern und Equipment ab – zu jeder Etappe und den wichtigsten Streckenabschnitten. Erhalten Sie exklusiv den TOUR Newsletter bereits am Vorabend jeder Etappe.
