Profile & map of stage 2 (Saturday, 2 July: Roskilde - Nyborg - 202.2 kilometres)
Re-Live: This is how the 2nd stage of the Tour de France 2022 went
Rolf Aldag's assessment: An open battle on the open sea
This stage today is set up for a sprint victory - but with a dramatic course beforehand. This day is also important for the final classification. I expect the favourites for the overall classification of the Tour de France to be very anxious - even to the point of panic.
The teams will hopefully have planned well when selecting the riders to protect the captains today. The route mixes a good 200 kilometres of tough climbs with narrow roads and sends the riders directly to the coast for long stretches. Due to the changes in direction, there is so much surface for the wind to attack that wind edges will tear the peloton apart.
18-kilometre-long bridge over the open sea
Teams with no interest in the overall ranking of the Tour de France will take advantage of this to ride aggressively - and then nobody can hold back, because a special challenge awaits in the final stage: the bridge over the Great Belt means 18 kilometres of racing over the open sea. The sprinter teams will dominate the action there at the latest.
Images of 2015 (see cover picture) come to mind, when Andre Greipel prevailed after the race over the storm surge barriers in the Netherlands. But this stage here is even more energy-sapping. If one of the Tour de France favourites loses touch early on, the wind could mean that it could even be a matter of minutes before the finish.
As a professional cyclist, our expert Rolf Aldag rode the Tour de France ten times up to 2004; as a manager and sports director, he has led various top teams through France and this year, for the first time, he will represent the German team Bora-Hansgrohe as head of sport at the Tour de France. There are few people who can tell you 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 difficulties 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 in 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 stage 2 of the Tour de France 2022*
- ARD - Das Erste: 14:35 - 17:20
- Eurosport 1: 12:00 - 17:15
- More live pictures on ARD One, Sportschau.de and Eurosportplayer.com**
- You can also find all the important information here in our live ticker
All stages of the 2022 Tour de France in the TOUR preview with Rolf Aldag
*Broadcast times subject to change; please note updates in teletext and on the Internet
**The Eurosport internet live stream is subject to a charge.
