Who Will Win The Tour de France?

Chris Froome and Ritchie Porte are the top picks. Spend too long watching them and someone else will ride away, just as we saw in the recent Critérium du Dauphiné when Astana set up Jacob Fuglsang for the win. With a varied route ahead it’ll be as interesting to see how the win happens as well as who stands atop the podium in Paris.

With enough unknowns to keep Heisenberg, Socrates and Karl Popper guessing here’s a closer look at the contenders and pretenders for the podium in Paris.

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Who Will Win The Green Jersey?

Peter Sagan? Casual followers of the sport who tune in for the Tour de France rather than the whole season can be forgiven for thinking Sagan’s team kit is green given spends he spends most of July in the maillot vert and he’s won it five times in a row.

So another verdant victory? Probably but this year’s route offers more stages to the pure sprinters than usual allowing a dominant sprinter to rack up points ahead of a consistent Sagan. Here’s a look at the competition, the points scale, the stages and the likely challengers for the green jersey and the sprint stages.

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Tour Guide

Here’s the 2017 Tour de France guide. There’s a profile of every stage with a quick take on the day as well as details on the points and mountains competitions, the suggested unmissable stages and more.

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Tour de France iCal

Here’s a downloadable calendar of the Tour de France for your electronic diary or phone with brief details of each stage.

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Widening The Gap

The UCI has announced several changes for the World Tour in 2018 including smaller team sizes for the grand tours, a topic covered late last year. Another novelty is going to be tested in the Tour de France starting next week, where the time gap to classify a group of riders, versus a split in the field, goes from one second to three seconds. It’s to help safety in the finish but will require a perceptual adjustment from inside the peloton and the outside.

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UCI Presidential Contest

We have a contest. David Lappartient has announced he will stand for election as UCI President, challenging the incumbent Brian Cookson. There’s now three months of campaigning before the UCI Congress in late September.

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How The UCI President Gets Elected

Brian Cookson

With David Lappartient announcing he’s standing for election to be the President of the UCI, to challenge the incumbent Brian Cookson, here’s a primer on how the election works.

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Can Simon Špilak Win The Tour de France?

No? Probably not? Why not? Apologies for the title which evokes Betteridge’s Law that states “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no” but it’s a way to explore questions about Simon Špilak, the calendar and more.

After the Critérium du Dauphiné the talk was all what it meant for the Tour de France. One week later and the day after another selective Alpine stage race and all there’s none of this talk.

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Friday Shorts

Domenico Pozzovivo leads the Tour de Suisse after winning Stage 6. This was Ag2r La Mondiale’s first win in the World Tour. Much had been made of Cannondale-Drapac not winning in the World Tour for two years until Andrew Talansky’s win in the Tour of California. This passed the longest “losing streak” onto Astana but they ended this in the Dauphiné with Jacob Fuglsang which in turn saw Ag2r La Mondiale inherit this label… ironically on a day when the stage finish was just minutes up the road from their service course HQ.

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