Stage 13 – Châtillon-Sur-Chalaronne to Grand Colombier (137.8km) – Friday, July 14

Friday is Bastille Day, and to honour the occasion the organisers of the Tour de France always plan something special for the legions of fans watching the race on TV or from the roadside. And since this year’s holiday falls on a Friday, Stage 13 is the first of three days of expected fireworks as the Tour heads back into the mountains, beginning with a summit finish atop the Hors Categorie (“Beyond Category”) Grand Colombier.

Beginning in Châtillon-Sur-Chalaronne (another first-time Tour host), we’re expecting a fast start. Attacks should go right from the drop of the flag as riders try to book a ticket into the day’s big breakaway. All of the French teams will send a rider or two up the road. A stage win is always a big deal for French riders and teams, but a stage win on Bastille Day? That’s the stuff dreams are made of!

Once the break goes it will be up to Jumbo-Visma and UAE Team Emirates, the teams of Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) and Slovenia’s Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates)–the top-2 riders on the Tour’s General Classification–to determine how much of lead they’ll be allowed to build. If they let the break run away from the peloton–as they did on Sunday’s stage to the Puy de Dôme–then we’ll essentially have two races to enjoy: the race to win the stage and–several minutes later–the race to win the Tour.

Working in favour of a potential breakaway is the fact that Stage 12 was so hard–and Stages 14 and 15 are even harder. So Jumbo-Visma and UAE Team Emirates might be happy to let a large group of stage hunters head up the road and save themselves for the Grand Colombier.

On the other hand, this stage is about 45km shorter than Stage 9 and there are no categorized climbs on the way to the Colombier, with the only real elevation gain coming as the riders climb up to Hauteville-Lompnes for the day’s intermediate sprint. Once through there they’ll plunge down to the Rhône river valley and the town of Culoz, from which the final ascent begins.

The Tour first tackled the Grand Colombier in 2012–and again in 2017–but it was first used as a summit finish in 2020, when Pogačar won the stage on the way to winning his first Tour de France.

There are four routes to the summit, and each year local cyclists organise a ride called the “Bugey Pyramid” that loops together all of them in a painful celebration of the mountain. In 2020 the riders completed three of them, but this year they’ll climb it just once, but from the same approach as they did at the finish in 2020–so many of them will know it well. And it’s a beast of an ascent with 17.4km of climbing, an average gradient of 7.1 percent, and few pitches that hit 12 percent just for good measure.

In 2020, an elite group stayed together up the climb, with attacks coming on the final ramps to the finish line. But the stage was longer and much harder in 2020, with two climbs before the Grand Colombier. Vingegaard Pogačar will be fresher this year, so whether they’re racing for the stage win themselves or racing a few minutes behind a breakaway, they might attack one another a bit further down the mountain in the hopes of creating bigger gaps than we saw three years ago.

Riders to watch

France’s Warren Barguil (Arkéa-Samsic) is the home favourite. He’s the quintessential French hero: a handsome climber who likes to attack. He’s not strong enough to win from a group with riders like Vingegaard and Pogačar, but if a breakaway survives, the former winner of the Tour’s King of the Mountains competition will have a chance.

The same goes for Canada’s Mike Woods (Israel-PremierTech), who won Stage 9 with a perfectly-timed effort up the Puy de Dôme, and Italy’s Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) who’s been quiet the past few days is perhaps saving himself for Stage 13.

But if the race comes back together or the breakaway is caught by a small group of GC contenders on the lower slopes of the Grand Colombier, it’s hard to see anyone other than Vingegaard and Pogačar winning the stage.

When to Watch

Whether the stage becomes two races or one, everything will go down on the Grand Colombier, which the race should hit around 16h30. Don’t miss it!