Tour de France 2023 - 13th stage | Friday, 14 July | Chatillon-sur-Chalaronne - Grand Colombier| 137.8 kilometres
Rolf Aldag's assessment of the 13th stage of the 2023 Tour de France: Showdown on the final climb
You can already tell that climbers feel very much at home on this Tour de France. On the bank holidays, the action shifts to the French Jura, where I expect a showdown of the best today. By that I actually mean an exchange of blows in prime time, because before that it makes no sense for the classement teams to go on the attack on this stage.
The route to the most challenging finish mountain of this year's tour is short. No time is wasted. The Grand Colombier is not the most famous mountain, but it has a good reputation among cyclists as a beautiful and also very demanding insider tip - it is notorious among sports fans because Tadej Pogacar left his compatriot Primoz Roglic behind before the finish in 2020. Roglic's team would have been better off not allowing the debutant to do that. The rest is history. Today, the Jumbo-Visma team should keep a better eye on the now two-time Tour winner, but the outcome can only be controlled by the best: they will persistently pick off the escapees over the 17.4 kilometres up to the finish and reduce the size of the leading group.
I don't think we'll see big time gaps between the top favourites today. It's more about winning the stage in the last few metres and the gaps of seconds for the classification.
Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of the 13th stage of the Tour de France 2023
- Neutral start: 13:45, sharp start 13:55
- Estimated arrival time: between 17:12 and 17:32
- TV broadcast: ARD - from 14:10, Eurosport - from 13:35
- Live stream: ARD one, sportschau.de, GCN+, Discovery+, Eurosport
Our expert Rolf Aldag
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 will once again be in charge of the German team Bora-Hansgrohe as sporting director at the Tour de France this year. There are few people who can tell so vividly what can happen on the stages of a grand tour and within the peloton. For TOUR, the 54-year-old sports manager has once again scrutinised the elevation profiles and march tables of 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 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: The more coloured jerseys our expert assigns to a stage, the greater their significance for the respective classification. The yellow jersey symbolises the weight of the 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. With these first-hand predictions, you can follow the TV broadcasts well informed and with profit!
