Tour de France 2022: Jonas Vingegaard bids for glory on stage 20 time-trial – live!

Key events

Stage profile

Stage 20 graphic

Preamble

There’s a description of time trials from Victor Hugo Peña, the time-trial specialist who in 2003 became the first Colombian to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour, in Matt Rendell’s fascinating book A Significant Other that has always stuck with me:

Time trials are about maintaining a constant pace, like a continuous hum. But they are also about pain, an agonising heat you feel in the stomach, a burning that affects your breathing. You get into a rhythm, and when the pain comes, you tunnel into it, exploring it to the bitter end … From top to bottom, front to back, I gather it into a smooth ball of pain that spins around in my mind until the time trial is over.

That is what the combatants are faced with today – 40.7km of tunnelling into the pain. For Jonas Vingegaard the light at the end of that tunnel is becoming the first Danish winner of the Tour de France (or, at least, the first Danish winner without a gigantic asterisk next to his name). To do so, he has to finish within 3min 25sec of Tadej Pogacar’s time across the Causses du Quercy in south eastern France – something, barring injury or accident, he is basically certain to do.

The first rider – last placed Caleb Ewan – is scheduled to come down the ramp at 12.05pm BST, with Vingegaard last out at 4pm.

source: theguardian.com