Profile, climbs & map of the 18th stage (Thursday, 21 July: Lourdes - Hautacam - 143.2 kilometres)
The 18th stage of the Tour de France in the live ticker
Neutral start: 13:30
Official start: 13:40
Finish: ~17:25-17:54
Rolf Aldag's assessment: Final attacks after Hautacam
Time for the showdown at the last mountain finish of the Tour de France 2022: Hautacam is a name with a great ring to it and a place with a lot of history. In 2014, for example, Vincenzo Nibali won there on his way to winning the Tour. I remember the exhaustion I experienced there in 1996. Back then, our leader Bjarne Riis wanted to swap his bike, but the first team car only had his normal bike on it - not the light mountain bike.
Riis insisted: it had to be the ultra-light bike. This meant that we first had to wait and ride it back to the front with the team until the start of the climb, using all our strength. After that, nothing worked for me. Riis, on the other hand, played with the competition and outdid them. If you want to win the Tour or finish on the podium, you can't hold back today.
With the knowledge of the final time trial the day after tomorrow, there is only one motto: make up seconds if the opportunity presents itself. The trend in recent years has also been towards the strongest riders actively shaping the race. They no longer just wait until the last few kilometres before the finish. It will be the same today: The favourites will hold nothing back. Tadej Pogacar will try with all his might to gain time on Jonas Vingegaard.
And the battle for the mountains jersey is also all to play for today. Simon Geschke has a huge chance of winning the Tour de France mountains classification.
As a professional cyclist, our expert Rolf Aldag rode the Tour de France ten times up to 2004; as manager and sporting director, he has led various top teams through France and this year, for the first time, he will be in charge of the German team Bora-Hansgrohe as sporting director at the Tour de France. There are few people who can tell so vividly what can happen on the stages of a grand tour and within the peloton.
What weighting does the stage have for the individual rankings?
For TOUR the 53-year-old sports manager has once again carefully studied the elevation profiles and route tables for this year's Tour de France. In his predictions, he names the teams and riders he sees at the front on each day, assesses the difficulty of the routes and says where he expects attacks and from whom. Will there be a bunch sprint? Will a breakaway group make it to the finish?
Aldag also assesses for TOUR what role each stage plays for the classification jerseys (see above): The more coloured jerseys our expert assigns to a stage, the greater its significance for the respective classification. The yellow jersey symbolises the weight of the respective stage in the overall classification, the green jersey stands for the importance of the best sprinter in the points classification and the red dotted jersey for the mountain classification, i.e. for the best climber.
TV broadcast & live stream of the 18th stage of the Tour de France 2022*
- ARD - Das Erste: 16:05 - 17:30
- Eurosport 1: 13:15 - 17:45
- More live pictures on ARD One, Sportschau.de and Eurosportplayer.com**
- You can also find all the important information here in our live ticker
The preview with Rolf Aldag of the stages of the 2022 Tour de France
This is how the stages of the 2022 Tour de France have gone so far
- The race report for stage 1
- The race report for stage 2
- The race report for stage 3
- The race report for stage 4
- The race report for stage 5
- The most spectacular pictures of stage 5
- The race report for stage 6
- The race report for stage 7
- The race report for stage 8
- The race report for stage 9
- The race report for stage 10
- The race report for the 11th stage
- The race report for the 12th stage
- The race report for the 13th stage
- The race report for stage 14
- The race report for the 15th stage
- The race report for the 16th stage
- The race report for the 17th stage
*Broadcast times subject to change; please note updates in teletext and on the Internet
**The Eurosport internet live stream is subject to a charge.
