Stage 12

The road

At the start

A flat road to Nîmes, and the wind

Ventoux cost Ben O'Connor second place — Urán, Vingegaard and Carapaz all step above him, all of them still over five minutes behind Pogačar — and it cost eight riders their Tour outright, Tony Martin and Luke Rowe among them. Today crosses the Rhône and takes the race up the Ardèche gorge for the first time in its history, then opens out into the Gard, where the wind gusts hard and an easy day stops being one.

How it was won

1. 150 km to go

   The break turns on itself

   Fifty kilometres out, with no sprinters' team willing to chase and success guaranteed, the thirteen leaders stop cooperating and start racing. Politt lights the first match.

2. 240 km to go

   Four clear at 70kph

   Sweeny goes and takes Küng, Politt and Erviti with him. Cross-tailwinds push the speeds past 70kph and make the thirty seconds they open almost impossible to close.

3. 312 km to go

   Politt's hammer-blow

   Sweeny has just dropped Küng on a small rise when Politt launches an enormous attack twelve kilometres from Nîmes. Neither Sweeny nor Erviti has anything to answer it with, and from that instant the stage is over.

4. 4At the line

   Nîmes

   Politt rides the final kilometres alone with time to take it all in — the second win of his professional career, and the biggest by a distance.

The result