Stage 4 | Tuesday, 4th July | Dax- Nogaro| 181.8 kilometres
Rolf Aldag's assessment: Finish on the race track
For those who went to the hotel yesterday with a score to settle, today is a chance for revenge: was the timing wrong, did the positioning or the material cause problems? The stage from Dax to Nogaro is clearly designed for the sprinters and their next plan.
First of all, the French public and especially the population in the Landes department celebrate one of the more successful representatives of their home country: André Darrigade came from Dax and won 22 stages of the Tour - which puts him in fifth place in the eternal stage hunter rankings. The breakaway group of the day will not have it easy, as the interest of the sprinters' teams in this stage is unlikely to be any less than on the previous day. This means that there will certainly be a control alliance of the speed-hungry representatives of these teams.
However, the finish in Nogaro promises a slightly different final sprint than in Bayonne. This is because the peloton turns onto a more than three-kilometre-long motor-racing circuit with a few twists and turns towards the finish. There is an S-curve on this course, where positioning will have a major impact on tactics. A lot can go wrong here. For the last 800 metres, the course heads straight towards the finish. It doesn't hurt if everything went smoothly beforehand.
Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of stage 4 of the 2023 Tour de France
- Neutral start: 13:10, sharp start 13:20
- Estimated arrival time: between 17:12 and 17:34
- TV broadcast: ARD - 14:10 to 17:25, Eurosport - 13 to 17:30
- 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!
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