Stage 21

The road

At the start

Paris, at dusk

Chris Froome will ride into Paris with 5:03 on Nairo Quintana and 5:47 on Joaquim Rodríguez, and the hundredth Tour de France is his. Quintana, twenty-three years old, took the Semnoz, the white jersey and the mountains jersey in a single afternoon. Tonight the race finishes late, its laps of the Champs-Élysées swinging around the Arc de Triomphe in the dark.

How it was won

1. 123 km to go

   Millar alone on the Champs-Élysées

   The hundredth Tour finishes at dusk, floodlit, with the Arc de Triomphe behind it. David Millar attacks first, is joined by Flecha, and when the Spaniard yields with twenty-three kilometres left he is left alone to ride the cobbles and the gutters of the most famous finishing straight there is.

2. 2At the line

   Kittel ends the streak

   Argos-Shimano time their run to the front perfectly and Marcel Kittel opens up inside two hundred metres. Greipel and Cavendish cannot close it — and Mark Cavendish's four-year hold on Paris is over. Behind them, Chris Froome rides in as the winner of the hundredth Tour de France.

The result