Albi – Toulouse

The day after a rest day is notorious for catching GC contenders cold, so they’ll be content indeed looking at the road book today to find a decidedly unthreatening parcours – short and flat! Crosswinds might be their only threat.

It’s surely a day for the sprinters and there’ll be pressure to perform, given this year’s race is so backloaded with mountain stages. It was around this juncture of the 2018 race when many of the top sprinters in the world were being unceremoniously booted out of the race, with a succession of time cuts missed. Aside from a stage in Nimes, it’s mountains and time trials from here till Paris, so if a sprinter hasn’t notched a win by Toulouse, their number might be up. Again, it’s rolling terrain, rather than pan-flat, and it’s hard to imagine anything other than a sprint win by Toulouse’s ‘Capitole’ building (its town hall). While Toulouse, France’s 4th biggest city, is in the top 20 stage hosts of all time (this will be its 26th), it’s not hosted one since 2008, when a young Mark Cavendish won his second Tour de France stage, in a race that began north of Albi in Figeac (this came three days after his first win in Châteauroux). Going back a little bit further, Toulouse hosted the finish of stage 3 in 1903, the first ever edition of the Tour.