Tour de France 2023 - Stage 8 | Saturday, 8 July | Libourne - Limoges | 200.7 kilometres
Rolf Aldag's assessment of stage 8 of the 2023 Tour de France: With power up to the finish line
Another stage for a sprint decision at the Tour de France 2023, but with a completely different character. The word "power sprint" is appropriate here, as the last half kilometre is a five per cent climb towards the finish in the city of Limoges.
But that's not all, because this finish comes at the end of an energy-sapping day. The second part of the 8th stage of the Tour de France 2023 is a constant up and down over the waves in the Perigord-Limousin Nature Park. This offers a variety of landscapes with water, forest and heathland in a small area. Today we can expect a mixture of aggressive action on the ride to the north-east and a sprint in the finale. The small elevations sap your strength. Here, however, it is almost impossible to leave your rivals behind. In Limoges, the route then climbs like a staircase to the finish in the town centre.
So the decision will look very different to the previous day, as guys like Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel and also the extremely strong Eritrean Biniam Girmay are favoured here. When a team like Alpecin-Deceuninck has two sprinters in position, there are exciting options: A fast rider can mount an attack to force the sprint trains of his rivals out of order - which would be good preparation for his colleague.
Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of stage 8 of the Tour de France 2023
- Neutral start: 12:30 pm, sharp start 12:45 pm
- Estimated arrival time: between 17:07 and 17:32
- TV broadcast: ARD - from 14:30, Eurosport - from 12:20
- 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!
