Key events
30km to go. There’s a crash in the peloton and Geraint Thomas is involved, more on that shortly. The gradient is flipping around 7% and the GC favourites have created some distance to the rest of the peloton on the climb. Pogacar took the mountains points at the top.
32km to go. The tension is increasing as the peloton nears the bottom of this first category three climb. The speed is up and the teams are battling for the A1 road position. Visma-Lease a Bike have taken up the head of the race with Wout Van Aert on the front.
37km to go. Lovely sweeping shots of the peloton as it glides through northern France. It looks like a multi-coloured snake weaving through fields of bright green and yellow. A beautiful race.
40km to go. Adam Yates pulls over for a bike change and loses about 40 seconds on the peloton, he will struggle to get back to the front to help Pogacar from there.
45km to go. I think we’ll see this stage really light up in about 15km when they hit the Côte du Haut Pichot, which is a category three climb that is short but steep, with a gradient of more than 10% at points.
47km to go. Full results of the intermediate sprint:
1. Fedorov, 20 pts
2. Leknessund, 17 pts
3. Van Moer, 15 pts
4. Armirail, 13 pts
5. Milan, 11 pts
6. Merlier, 10 pts
7. Girmay, 9 pts
8. Philipsen, 8 pts
9. Turgis, 7 pts
10. Coquard, 6 pts
11. Penhoët, 5 pts
12. Rex, 4 pts
13. Costiou, 3 pts
14. Van Poppel, 2 pts
15. Wellens, 1 pt
54km to go. We have a sprint! Armirail goes early from the breakaway but Fedorov reels him in and takes the 20 points. In the race for fifth down there’s some angry words exchanged between Jonathan Milan and Biniam Girmay after won the Italian won the battle for the best of the rest. Milan was seemingly unhappy about Girmay swinging in front of him on the bend approaching the sprint. The break has now been absorbed.
58km to go. The breakaway riders know their day off the front is coming to an end. Can they make it to the intermediate sprint? The gap is now down to 35 seconds with about 3km to go until the sprint.
63km to go. The intermediate sprint is coming up in 10km. Jasper Philipsen knows he won’t be in yellow forever and will likely be involved as he bids to hang on to the points jersey. The leaders are going through Montreuil across the cobbles and the peloton has shaved more time off that lead, it’s now down to 50 seconds.
Always nice to get correspondence from our international readers, so thank you, Jeremy Hopwood:
Currently following the text updates at 7am in Vancovuer Canada (at a swim meet for the next eight hours camped out waiting for the kids to swim – basically like a sprint stage = waiting around all day for 60 seconds of action!)
Escape Collective is my podcast suggestion which is a mix of independent cycling journalism along with some behind the scenes entertainment. Their daily Tour digest is a great listen.
77km to go. Soren Waerenskjold is off the back of the peloton with a mechanical issue. The winds are picking up and with the main bunch going at more than 50km/h the Uno-X Mobility rider will have a tough ride to get back in touch.
85km to go. The pace is being picked up in the peloton. It touched 65km there briefly and the gap to the breakaway is dwon to 1min 50secs.
Cofidis has 11 bikes stolen before stage two after truck break-in
Team Cofidis had 11 bikes stolen from their truck overnight before the start of the second stage of the Tour de France, the team said on Sunday.
The team, based near Lille, were able to find enough bikes to start stage two, a 209.1km hilly ride from Lauwin-Planque to Boulogne-sur-Mer, but they condemned the burglary.
Each bike is estimated by the team to have cost €13,000.
‘The door of the workshop truck was forced open, and 11 of our LOOK Cycle bikes were stolen despite the security measures that had been put in place,’ the team said in a statement.
‘The Cofidis team strongly condemns this act of incivility and calls on the perpetrators to act with civility and responsibility.’
The team added that police officers visited the hotel to document the burglary and had begun their investigation. Reuters
My podcast feed is filling up for the train home later, George Scott has come through with another shout:
I think you can’t get better for top level cycling analysis than the Lanterne Rouge podcast and its accompanying YouTube tactical videos. Patrick Boe is dry, honest and exceptionally switched on. You just have to get past Benji’s laugh and you’ll be on to a winner. Patrick now being employed as a team manager for (and for the record, not showing any favouritism on the pod) has shown how far he’s come from making videos overnight while he worked full time as a lawyer in Australia. Coining the term “tug-buddies” may be its best achievement though.
95km to go. The riders who went down are working through the team cars to get back on. The group of five riders are about 1min 20secs behind. Wright is one of them and he’ll be desperate to stay in touch as he definitely has a chance of taking the stage today with his skillset. That will depend a lot on how he recovers over the next 60km or so.
99km to go. We have another crash, this one looks more serious. It’s not clear exactly what happened but Visma-Lease a Bike’s Victor Campenaerts, Eddie Dunbar from Jayco-Alula and Fred Wright from Bahrain Victorious are a few of the riders who went down. Wright has a visible cut on his face. We managed to get through the wet without too much incident but now it has dried out perhaps a few riders felt they could relax?
103km to go. There’s a spill in the peloton and it looks like Adam Yates is one of those on the deck. Nothing too serious, thankfully, and we’re back underway.
104km to go. There’s a sprint for the line at the top of the hill which sees Leknessund pass Van Moer in the last few metres. The Norwegian’s eventful day continues.
105km to go. We’re on the climb and we’ll see shortly who bags the single polka dot point on offer.
Ted Raney has more podcast suggestions:
The Move is also a guilty pleasure for me. Though episodes with Spencer [Martin]
can get in the bin.
I also love the Social Distance Podcast, which, despite featuring
antipodeans, makes me laugh like a drain. However, it seems they can’t
really get it together to cast regularly.
Chris Horner calling everyone idiots is a turn off for me. I also find Geraint’s pod hard going because of Tom Fordyce.
Harsh on Tom Fordyce, I always thought he was the secret sauce of Peter Crouch’s podcast and it lost a step when he had to drop out.
114km to go. We have about 10km until the peloton hits its first categorised climb of the day. The Côte de Cavron-Saint-Martin is only short, about 1km and maxes out at 5.9%, so it’s unlikely to throw up any surprises.
Robin Lynch has got in first with the cycling podcast suggestions:
Cycling Podcast is the one and only for me, especially when they feature 40-year Tour veteran, troubadour, gourmand and Tour historian Francois Thomazeau.
That is very much the OG podcast in cycling and it is a lovely listen. I used to be a religious listener but these days I dip in and out. For my sins, I also enjoy Lance Armstrong’s The Move during the grand tours. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea (for obvious reasons), but the analysis is often brutally honest.
121km to go. Leknessund has another issue as he needs to pull over to get some work done on his bike. I imagine he will make his way back to the other three in the breakaway but it’s not been straightforward for the Norwegian rider. He’s about 13 seconds behind the leaders now.
As promised, here is William Preston’s email:
Looks proper wet, doesn’t it?
It’s only stage two but I fear the fever dream I had shall not come to pass: Visma using Vingegaard as a stalking horse against Pogacar as Yates sits quietly a minute or so behind in the GC ranking before getting a stomp on up the mountains to win it all. After his thrilling heroics in Italy, he deserves a second grand tour win.
However, this year looks set to be an absolute corker, with Visma redefining super domestique riders to topple Pogacar’s crown.
My apologies to John Westwell, who was the author that email. I do have an email from William Preston that I will be sharing shortly.
John Westwell has emailed in with a couple of points on today’s stage:
Firstly, I wasn’t surprised to see Simon Yates lose time yesterday. Well, maybe seeing him lose time on the first stage, but not in general. After the massive high of winning the Giro – especially the way he did it by laying to rest the ghosts of the Colle delle Finestre from 2018 – he was always going to struggle to be competitive for the Tour. Physiologically, he isn’t the sort of rider who can be competitive in two stage races barely a month apart. With the exception of Pogacar, no rider is these days, but a climber who only weighs 58kg is always going to struggle to come back to form so quickly. I won’t be surprised if Simon isn’t particularly visible in the high mountains in the later parts of the stage. I think it will be largely up to Kuss and Jorgenson to accompany Vingegaard when the action hots up.
Secondly, Ned Boulting flagged up that he was going to read a passage from Les Miserables a few weeks ago on his podcast. He had identified the route on this stage as linking the two towns which he mentioned as being on today’s stage.
There’s a ‘demob happy’ atmosphere about the ITV crew this year, not least now that Boulting and Millar – accompanied by Lizzie Deignan – will be on the Tour next year reporting from the roadside independently of ITV. I’d expect a few more odd interludes in the next three weeks.
Ned Boulting is a fantastic broadcaster, I hope he can find a way back on to our screens when the Tour goes behind a paywall on TNT next year. I had a lovely chat with him before a tour several years ago for a preview piece that never got published, a thoroughly charming man. Here’s a question for the readers, what are your favourite cycling podcasts during the Tour? There’s a fair few to choose from these days.
154km to go. Tim Wellens has a issue with his bike and the camera captures him having a comfort break before eventually figuring out what’s going on and pans over to the mechanic who’s working on the bike.
158km to go. There is an absolutely huge bull being tugged around a field on the back of a tractor by a smiley farmer. Great stuff. The breakaway group has reformed and is now 2mins 33secs ahead of the peloton.
I should point out that we have a bumper afternoon of sport on Big Website today. Rob Smyth has over-by-over coverage of the fifth day of the second Test between England and India:
If tennis is more your thing, Daniel Harris is across everything at Wimbledon. Follow that here:
164km to go. We have a crash in the breakaway! Fedorov and Andreas Leknessund hit the deck on a slippery bend. It looks like both riders just lost their back wheels underneath them. Fortunately they are both back up and look fine. They’ve lost about 20 seconds but are working together to get back up to Armirail and Van Moer.
172km to go. You know it’s early on a long stage because now Ned Boulting is reading passages from Les Miserables. The breakaway is now 2mins 42secs ahead of the main bunch.
Nick Wayne has emailed in:
Simon Yates, What happened? Six minutes in arrears means relegation to super domestique. Was that the plan? No competition to Pog I suppose.
After his dramatic win at the Giro, I think Simon Yates was always going to be delegated the task of support rider to Jonas Vingegaard at the Tour. With that kind of time gap he’ll also now have more of a chance of going for the odd stage win when the race reaches the mountains.
182km to go. The weather is grey but the vibes are high on the roadside, there’s a brass band playing as the peloton passes through another commune.
190km to go. The peloton is cruising along at around 50km/h, not top speed but a fair lick. On ITV the action is so hot that the broadcast is just playing the Carpenters’ ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ over the top of the live pictures, quite why isn’t clear. On the road, Movistar’s Nelson Oliveira has come off the back for a backwheel tyre change and is now trying to work his way back into the peloton.
199km to go. The four-man breakaway has settled in and pulled out a lead which is now more than two minutes. Yevgeni Fedorov (XDS-Astana), Bruno Armirail (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), Brent Van Moer (Lotto) and Andreas Leknessund (Uno-X Mobility) are the brave men who will try to take this lead to finish.
206km to go. We have racing, in what looks like truly awful conditions. There are four brave souls who are making an early bid to form the break. Once I’ve figured out who they are I will let you know.
The ceremonial rollout is winding its way out of Lauwin-Planque and we are aproaching the flag drop in about 1km. Some of the riders were a bit late arriving at the start line due to traffic on the narrow streets of the commune that is home to just 1,600 people so we’re a bit behind schedule. A lot of the riders are in their rain gear, which provides a bit more protection for them but makes my job a little harder as they’re all in black jackets tough over their typical jerseys. Kilometre zero incoming.
Preamble
Settle in folks, this is going to be a long one. The total length of the stage is a mammoth 209.1km, with a few categorised climbs that will probably weed out the pure sprinters but nothing too punishing. The good news is the finale will be worth the wait. The read on the stage profile is that the stage will explode in the final 35km, where there are a couple steep lumps and a bit of an incline towards a finish line, which runs along the banks of the river Liane in the streets of Boulogne. This will be one for the puncheurs and an early opportunity for the likes of Mathieu van der Poel or Wout van Aert to bag a stage and the yellow jersey. Just to cover my own back, I should point out that Tadej Pogacar is as capable of winning this stage as any other but will he want to show his hand this early? Frankly, trying to predict what the Slovenian will do is a fool’s game, so I will refrain from doing that.
What is easier to predict is that the weather will definitely be a factor. In typical northern French fashion, rain and crosswinds are going to batter a peloton that will be full of riders wary of being on the wrong side of any split. Tension can lead to mistakes and hopefully we won’t see a repeat of the crashes that marred stage one.
Grab your snacks, get yourself a drink and follow along. I will have you covered through to the end of the stage. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, do send them in via the link at the top of the page.
