Stage 20 | Saturday, 20 July | Nice - Col de la Couillole | 132.8 kilometres | 4600 vertical metres
Rolf Aldag's assessment of the 20th stage: Setback without effect?
Today will certainly not be much easier than yesterday - quite the opposite. The stage is considerably shorter and also has more metres in altitude. And there is another important factor: The fatigue that riders picked up on the way to Isola 2000 is kicking in today. For once, all their energies will be focussed on the mountain arrival at the Col de la Couillole. The profile offers hardly any chance for breakaways. This last road race of the Tour de France 2024 will be too controlled by the strongest teams in the overall standings, the speed will be too high. Last year, there were images on the Col de la Couillole that could give sports fans hope for a battle of the best this year.
At Paris-Nice, Tadej Pogacar won up there in the final sprint of the uphill finish ahead of David Gaudu and Jonas Vingegaard. I think it's quite likely that a rider who was beaten yesterday will be out to make amends today - and at least win the stage. However, I wouldn't expect the Tour to become more exciting the more difficult the final days in the mountains are. The opposite is more likely to be the case. The tendency is relatively clear: the superior riders and their teams, Jumbo-Visma in the last two years, will only become more dominant during such a Tour de France because these parcours simply suit them.
Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of the 20th stage of the Tour de France 2024
- Neutral start: 13:35, sharp start 13:55
- Estimated arrival time: between 17:18 and 17:44
- TV broadcast: ARD 14:00 - 18:00, Eurosport 1 13:15 - 18:00
- 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 20th 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 each stage for the 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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