Stage 2 | Sunday, 30 June | Cesenatico - Bologna | 199.2 kilometres | 1850 vertical metres
Rolf Aldag's assessment of stage 2: Tough battle in Bologna
Things get emotional before the race starts. Hardly anyone has moved cycling in Italy as much as Marco Pantani, who grew up in Cesenatico and started cycling there at the age of eleven. His life ended tragically 20 years ago in Rimini, yesterday's stage finish. Today's stage would have been nothing for the mountain flea. It starts very flat and ends with a cut-out for puncheurs. First of all, the route leads unspectacularly away from the coast.
Do you remember the World Championship in Imola, the Gallisterna climb? Back then, Tadej Pogacar attacked the field on the 12.8 per cent steep, one kilometre long climb. The action is also likely to start at this point today. However, there is too much flat road ahead of the riders to expect a decisive breakaway attempt.
The finale in Bologna is a tough one. The road to the Basilica of San Luca is notorious in cycling. Primoz Roglic has won a Giro time trial here and triumphed in the Giro dell'Emilia. There will be a tough fight to get up the steep climb, which has to be tackled twice. I assume that the first riders will be cancelling their classification ambitions and looking for new goals. All the teams will be delighted if they survive these two days unscathed.
Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of stage 2 of the Tour de France 2024
- Neutral start: 12:15, sharp start 12:35
- Estimated arrival time: between 17:06 and 17:33
- TV broadcast: ARD - 15:30 - 17:44, Eurosport 1 12:00 - 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
Stage 2 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 analysed this year's Tour exclusively for the readers of TOUR.
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.
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