Tour de France Femmes 2025 - Stage 6: Lichtenberg's preview: The first mountain stage

Stage 6 | Thursday, 31 July 2025 | Clermont-Ferrand - Ambert | 123.7 kilometres | 2397 vertical metres

Claudia Lichtenberg's assessment of stage 6

This is a real mountain stage with 2397 metres in altitude. 123.7 kilometres - that's not super long, but it also means more altitude metres per kilometre. Again, the difficulties are in the second part of the route. The hills are long, but not steep - all with an average gradient of just over 5 per cent. I would say this is preparation for the next few days. The overall classification won't really be decided today. But the battle for the stage win will certainly be a nice spectacle.

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Of course, the route also offers the potential for a victory from an early breakaway group and plenty of opportunities to collect points in the mountain classifications if you want to win the polka dot jersey. But above all, the favourites for the overall victory are worried: Can I let a climber like Puck Pieterse, for example, get away and then correct that later on the Col de la Madeleine? I believe that because of the brevity of the tour, they won't dare to give breakaways a big lead. That's why the riders with the big names won't let anyone get away by a few seconds until late in the finale.

Schedule, TV coverage & live stream of stage 6 of the Tour de France Femmes 2025

• Neutral start: 14:00, sharp start 14:25
• Estimated arrival time: between 17:33 and 17:55
• TV broadcast: ARD: 17:00-17:15, Eurosport 1 15:15-18:15
• Live stream: ARD-Mediathek, sportschau.de, Discovery Plus (for a fee)

TOUR expert Claudia Lichtenberg

She was one of the best tour specialists in German cycling - at a time when there was no Tour de France for women. Claudia Lichtenberg won the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de l'Aude in 2009 under her maiden name Häusler, the toughest stage races in women's cycling at the time. Alongside her job as a racing cyclist, she completed a degree in mechanical engineering. Today, the 39-year-old from Munich works as an engineer and, together with her husband Christian, comments on women's races on the Discovery+/Eurosport platforms.