Tour de France 2023 - 14th stage | Saturday, 15 July | Annemasse - Morzine les Portes du Soleil | 151.8 kilometres
Rolf Aldag's assessment of the 14th stage of the 2023 Tour de France: Full throttle into the finish
A difficult stage that is also difficult to predict. Will the breakaway have a chance today? That depends on the constellation of the teams, who could control the action for their contenders for victory - but may not necessarily have to.
At the back of his mind, of course, is the respect for tomorrow's stage, which ends the second week of the Tour on a very difficult mountain. But it is advisable to focus on the here and now. Today's route plan is one difficult climb after the next. Three first-category climbs, then the famous Col de Joux Plane with its immensely steep five kilometres just before the pass and the demanding descent to the finish make for a very difficult stage. If the helpers are exhausted here, immense damage can be done to the classification with a spirited ride over the last 18 kilometres. After all, modern cycling also involves forcing opponents to make mistakes in extreme situations.
In a descent like this, complete racers like Tadej Pogacar or Jonas Vingegaard have a great opportunity to convert technical advantages into time gaps. So it's all about going into the descent at full speed on the last mountain.
Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of the 14th stage of the Tour de France 2023
- Neutral start: 13:05, sharp start 13:20
- Estimated arrival time: between 17:18 and 17:51
- TV broadcast: ARD - from 14:30, Eurosport - from 12:55
- 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!
