Profile, pave sectors & map of stage 5 (Wednesday, 6th July: Lille Metropole - Arenberg Porte du Hainaut - 153.7 kilometres)
Re-Live: This is how the 5th stage of the 2022 Tour de France went
Rolf Aldag's assessment: Luck and bad luck on cobblestones
The Tour de France has certainly not been easy on the nerves up to this point. However, this stage has been fuelling anxiety among riders, sporting directors and the staff in the background for some time now. A lot of logistics are required for this day, and breakdowns must be avoided.
But while the riders have mostly been in control during the previous stages, luck or bad luck will be of paramount importance on the route from Lille to Arenberg. It is much more difficult to plan and impossible to predict which scenarios will materialise when the Tour bunch is racing over the eleven pavé passages.
Important day for the overall standings
Of course, the protagonists took a close look at the sectors in spring. The cobblestones during the Tour are also nowhere near as difficult to ride as the bumpy roads at Paris-Roubaix. Nevertheless, the main priority for the classification riders today is to get to the finish in one piece and without losing time, which is why the teams will deploy most of their helpers to protect them.
Good for those specialists who get a free hand. Riders like Mathieu van der Poel or, depending on the stable order, Wout Van Aert will play to their strengths on this Tour de France stage.
For Mathieu and his team, it should be a dream come true to ride into the hotel with the yellow jersey in this historic cycling region.
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 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 stage 5 of the Tour de France 2022*
- ARD - Das Erste: 16:05 - 17:30
- Eurosport 1: 13:25 - 17:30
- 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
*Broadcast times subject to change; please note updates in teletext and on the Internet
**The Eurosport internet live stream is subject to a charge.
