Profile & map of stage 4 (Tuesday, 5 July: Dunkirk - Calais - 171.5 kilometres)
The live ticker for stage 4 of the Tour de France 2022
Rolf Aldag's assessment: Only sprint or wind as well?
The Tour de France is back home. The rest day should be seen as a time of exertion rather than a rest day - travelling from the south of Denmark to the north of France means stress for everyone involved.
Now an interesting stage awaits. Anyone looking at the map and assuming a flat route is wrong: The route does lead from coastal town to coastal town, but through the hinterland of Calais. This means a lot of tough hills on rather narrow roads in a pretty, green landscape. It is a classic terrain with almost 2,000 metres of elevation gain.
25 kilometres along the coast
The final stage is 25 kilometres along the coast, two hills should trigger a selection. However, I think it is extremely unlikely that individual attackers or even a small group will have a serious chance of victory on this route to Calais.
The sprint finish in Calais will tempt the sprinter teams to take revenge for the first few days in Denmark. The wind could once again throw a spanner in the works, causing some turbulence in the Tour de France peloton on the way to the flat finish sprint. Wind edges are a real danger on such routes, not only for the sprinters, but of course also for the contenders for a podium place in Paris.
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 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 4th stage of the Tour de France 2022*
- ARD - Das Erste: 16:05 - 17:30
- Eurosport 1: 13:00 - 17:30
- More live pictures on ARD One, Sportschau.de and Eurosportplayer.com**
- You can also find all the important information in our live ticker
- General information about the TV broadcast and livestream of the Tour de France can be found here
The preview of the Tour de France stages 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.
