Profile, final climb & map of stage 7 (Friday, 8 July: Tomblaine - La Super Planche des Belles Filles - 176.3 kilometres)
Re-Live: This is how the 7th stage of the Tour de France went
Neutral start: 13:05
Official start: 13:15
Finish: ~17:17-17:43
Rolf Aldag's assessment: Two races on the mountain of destiny
The Planche des Belles Filles is a historic cycling venue. This is where the dramatic individual time trial of the Tour de Francewhere Tadej Pogacar took the overall victory on the penultimate day in 2020. Here he won Vincenzo Nibali 2014, took the yellow jersey again and defended it until the end of the Tour.
I wouldn't expect such a dramatic event at the first mountain finish of this year's Tour de France, but I would expect two hard-fought races on one and the same stage. The final climb has the attribute "super" because the gravel sections with a gradient of around 20 per cent just before the finish added a considerable difficulty to the Vosges mountain.
Runaway victory on stage 7?
I assume that after a long, hard fight up to this climb, a breakaway group with riders who are stable on the climbs will have formed, from the midst of which will come the stage winner and perhaps even a new yellow jersey wearer. However, this rider will not be a candidate for the overall victory.
The favourites are likely to test each other hard for the first time further back in the race on the seven-kilometre, 8.7 per cent climb to the finish, but are unlikely to attack decisively. It may be a phrase, but it fits as well as on the previous days: another stage on which an aspirant for the overall victory of this Tour cannot win, but can certainly lose.
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.
VIDEO: 15 Tour de France terms explained
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 stage 7 of the Tour de France 2022*
- ARD - Das Erste: 16:05 - 17:35
- Eurosport 1: 12:55 - 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
This is how the stages of the 2022 Tour de France have gone so far
*Broadcast times subject to change; please note updates in teletext and on the Internet
**The Eurosport internet live stream is subject to a charge.
