Tour de France 2021: stage 10 – live!

139km to go: Pardon the analogy – I am well aware it’s Tuesday and all the riders are wearing Tour-sanctioned, cycling-appropriate Lycra.

141km to go: The two chaps in the breakaway are being kept on a fairly tight rein, their lead now down to 3min 39sec. They don’t look too bothered and are chatting away to each other on what continues to be a very relaxed day with a kind of casual, dress-down Friday feel about it.

143km to go: In the breakaway, Tosh van der Sande gets some running repairs, his team car pulling al;ongside him so a mechanic can lean out the back window and oil his chain.

150km to go: The gap is at 4min 29sec as nothing much continues to happen at great length on this transition stage. It’s the calm before tomorrow’s Alpine storm, when the riders have to tackle not one but two ascents of Mont Ventoux.

160km to go: The gap is stretched to 5min 10sec, with Tosh van der Sande (Lotto-Soudal) and Hugo Houle (Astana-Premier Tech) making the pace for today.

Team Bike Exchange’s stage nine diary

The Australian team chronicle their efforts to get Michael Matthews closer to Mark Cavendish in the Green Jersey points classification on Sunday’s gruelling stage nine.

173km to go: There’s lots of chatting and joking going on in a very relaxed looking peloton as the two-man escape party stretch the gap to 4min 16sec.

185km to go: Lotto-Soudal rider Tosh van der Sande and Astana-Premier Tech’s Hugo Houle have opened a gap of 90 seconds on the bunch.

190km to go: The peloton leaves Albertville and is given the signal to race by race director Christian Prudhomme. Lotto Soudal warhorse and breakaway specialist Thomas De Gendt is front and centre of the bunch, having stated after stage eight that it took everything he had to stay in touch with the peloton.

““I rode one of my best ten-minute efforts ever at the start [of stage 8],” he told Sporza, in an interview picked up by Cycling Weekly. “ Those values have been recorded since 2013. Normally, with those values, I can ride the whole peloton to pieces. Here, I was 100 metres behind in a group of 70 riders – and I started from the front row. When you’re not in the peloton after that it’s clear that the general level is just much higher.”

The roll-out is well under way and racing is due to begin in a couple of minutes.

Out of the race: A total of 12 riders who completed stage eight failed to start stage nine, started it but failed to complete it, finished outside the time limit or threw in the towel since it ended.

Primoz Roglic, Arnaud Demare, Mathiu van der Poel, Tim Merlier Nans Peters and Bryan Coquard are among the more high profile absentees from the start of stage 10 today. A total of 19 riders have withdrawn from the race for one reason or another since the race began, leaving a 157-strong peloton.

William Fotheringham’s stage-by-stage guide: This might be more interesting than your average flat “transition” stage because there’s just enough climbing at key points to suggest that the sprint teams might not have it all their own way. If Sagan is feeling frisky he might try to burn off one or two of the heavier brethren, and if Ewan’s Lotto have lost riders who would normally work to control the stage [narrator’s voice: Ewan’s Lotto have lost Ewan], or if Deceuninck are marshalling Alaphilippe in the yellow jersey [narrator’s voice: they aren’t], the chances are a break will succeed with an opportunistic win for a rider like Thomas De Gendt or Søren Kragh Andersen.