Tour de France 2018: race heads to Alpe d'Huez on stage 12 – live!
19 July 2018 10:57
Live updates from the third day in the French AlpsFroome salutes Thomas after Sky teammate takes yellowAnd feel free to email Simon or tweet @Simon_Burnton 11.57am BST I’m with Gary: the great climbs are particularly exhilarating when your ascent is powered by a motor.On Monday, I rode my bike up to Beachy Head @Simon_Burnton. The sensation of climbing is wonderful, as views open up below and the sky expands. But it's hard work, even for a comparative hump like that. Oh - and I had 700cc of Honda power pushing me through the virages. 11.53am BST 148km to go: Theuns didn’t get very far with his solo break, and the nobody else has had a go yet. The climbing starts in less than a kilometre. 11.51am BST 151km to go: It’s all been downhill so far. Enjoy it while it lasts. It’s but a few kilometres to Notre-Dame-de-Briançon, which seems to be a train station rather than a town, and from there it gets tough. 11.48am BST And this here is a photographic history of the Alpe d’Huez: Related: Alpe d'Huez: the history and the heroes – in pictures 11.43am BST Here is your good news story of the day:Yesterday Edvald Boasson Hagen was stranded with a broken bike and no team car. Team Sky gave him a bike to finish the stage, for which he and Servais Knaven were fined. This morning Boasson Hagen came and found Knaven with €150 to cover the fine. pic.twitter.com/eZF65eRePh 11.42am BST The tour is about to pass through Moutiers, a town that may be familiar with skiers. In a bid to find out about Moutiers I have discovered that it about 800km from the Gorge du Moutiers (which is on the coast near Le Havre) and about 700km from Les Trois-Moutiers (which is not far from Poitiers). 11.35am BST 163km to go: Edward Theuns of Sunweb has set off on his own, apparently intent on a monstrously tough and outlandishly unlikely solo breakaway. 11.32am BST Here’s an awesome interactive we produced in 2015, looking at what it takes to tackle the climb of Alpe d’Huez, and some of the Tour’s most memorable moments: Related: Tour de France: the climb of Alpe d'Huez – interactive 10.55am BST And so, it is today. The Alpe d’Huez, the most famous climb on the Tour, an ascent of myth and legend, returns to the schedule after a two-year absence. But that’s just the finale, the conclusion to a vicious day that will cover 175.5km and three hors categorie summits: the Col de la Madeleine (25.3km of climbing at an average gradient of 6.2%), the Col de la Croix de Fer (29km at 5.2%) and finally the Alpe d’Huez (13.8km at 8.1%), though organisers have kindly also squeezed in the category two Lacets de Montvernier by way of bonus. Tomorrow is slightly shorter and a great deal flatter: today is a day to leave everything out on the road.The big news today is that last year’s runner-up, Rigoberto Uran, who crashed painfully on the cobbles on stage nine but two days ago insisted that “we are here until the final. We are not giving up”, has given up. “It’s difficult for me and also for my team,” he said today, after his abandonment was announced. “We prepared for this Tour, all season we were focused on the Tour. Sometimes this happens, and this time, I think it’s the best decision for me to recover and to recover well.” Continue readingread full article
