If there is one thing we can acknowledge and appreciate about this Tour de France, it is the abundance of surprises. Every day brings something new to leave us speechless: an unexpected result, a spectacular display, a heartbreaking withdrawal. Still reeling from Remco Evenepoel's withdrawal on the Tourmalet, we marvelled at Thymen Arensman's ride and wondered how open the battle for the Yellow Jersey still was when Tadej Pogacar had to respond to Jonas Vingegaard's attacks and, for once in the Pyrenees, didn’t manage to drop his Danish rival with his own acceleration. The race is alive and looks set to provide us with plenty of excitement.
This Sunday, the peloton will leave the Pyrenees and head for Carcassonne, a medieval city that has become a modern classic of the Grande Boucle with a fourth finish in the last eight editions, always preceded by a leg-sapping route. Two of them were decided by a reduced sprint in favour of Mark Cavendish (2021) and Jasper Philipsen (2022); the first in the series, with a large breakaway won by Magnus Cort (2018). On this occasion, the route enters its second half through a mountain range with an evocative name, “la Montagne Noire”. The most notable ascent there will be the Pas du Sant (cat.-2), a wall of almost three kilometres with an average gradient of more than 10%, after which there will be 13 gruelling kilometres of false flat before the descent to the finish line.
With the peloton exhausted at the end of the second week, the breakaway seems to have more options than the sprinters. Cort is here with Uno-X to repeat his victory, and we cannot rule out the chances of titans such as Mathieu Van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) or up-and-coming riders like Romain Grégoire (Groupama-FDJ). Keep an eye out for riders who are out of contention for the overall classification and looking to make up for lost time in the Black Mountain after their struggles in the Pyrenees.
