Stage 13 | Friday, 12 July | Agen - Pau | 165.3 kilometres | 2000 vertical metres

Rolf Aldag's assessment of the 13th stage: Attack for green

You can already see the Pyrenees today. In any case, there's no denying that the climbing days will start again tomorrow. Nevertheless, we are once again faced with a flat stage which, on closer inspection, does raise some questions. The finish is well-known, Pau is one of the established stage locations and has been on the Tour of France programme for the 75th time. Marcel Kittel took his fifth victory in eleven stages here in 2017 - a fabulous performance. With the two categorised climbs in the final 40 kilometres, there is a chance that the sprinter teams will also go into battle with each other early on. Riders like Mark Cavendish, Dylan Groenewegen or Fabio Jakobsen, the pure sprinters, could get into trouble here.

As a sporting director, I would speculate on this if I wanted to bring a man like Mads Pedersen or, of course, Jasper Philipsen to the finish. So you could manage to reduce the group of promising rivals for the final metres before the actual finish. If there are still several serious candidates for the green jersey at this point in the Tour de France, this stage will be all the more important. The full number of points can be bagged here at the finish line - if competitors are left behind en route, this means a serious setback in the points classification.

Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of the 13th stage of the Tour de France 2024

• Neutral start: 13:30, sharp start 13:50
• Estimated arrival time: between 17:21 and 17:41
• TV broadcast: ARD 14:10 - 17:35, Eurosport 1 13:00 - 17:30
• Live stream: ARD one, sportschau.de, GCN+, Discovery+, Eurosport
• All stages of the Tour de France 2024 at a glance
• All info on TV broadcast & live stream
• The start list
• The regulations

The 13th stage of the Tour de France 2024 in the live ticker

TOUR expert Rolf Aldag

As a racer with a great overview, Rolf Aldag was a bank for successful Tour teams and supported Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich in their victories in France. As a sports manager and sporting director, the Westphalian is also one of the most respected representatives in the industry. He is also planning the Tour de France mission again in 2024 with the newly named Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team. As in previous years, Aldag has once again focussed exclusively on this year's tour for TOUR readers.

The 55-year-old has looked at the dramaturgy of the route planners and gone into detail to assess the possible course of the individual stages. In this work, he reflects on which constellations are likely in the race and which riders are likely to have particular hopes - or worries - on which stages. He also includes his view on innovations and trends in the business. In addition, Aldag provides a compact overview of the relevance of the respective stage for which classification. He assigns zero to three jerseys per classification: for the overall classification (yellow jersey), the points classification for the best sprinters (green jersey) and the Tour's mountain classification (dotted jersey). In this way, Rolf Aldag's forecast offers added value every day.

Further stage previews for the Tour de France 2024

• Stage 1
• Stage 2
• 3rd stage
• Stage 4
• Stage 5
• Stage 6
• Stage 7
• Stage 8
• 9th stage
• Stage 10
• Stage 11
• Stage 12
• 14th stage
• 15th stage
• 16th stage
• 17th stage
• 18th stage
• 19th stage
• Stage 20
• 21st stage

TOUR at the Tour de France: Exclusive live blog