Stage 13

The road

At the start

The longest stage, and ambush country

Nothing moved in Bilbao: Quintana still leads Froome by fifty-four seconds and Valverde by 1:05. Today is the longest stage of the race, 212 kilometres across the Basque hills with seven categorised climbs, and the last thirty are ambush country — a second-category summit and then five kilometres of descent to the line. The Pyrenees are tomorrow, which is the only reason to hold anything back.

How it was won

1. 149 km to go

   Lagutin makes sense of his day

   Eighteen minutes up the road and ten kilometres ahead of a peloton barely averaging 36 kph, Sergey Lagutin leads over the Lizaieta ahead of Cardis and Conti to move to the top of the mountains classification.

2. 219 km to go

   The endgame at last

   With 19km to go Danilo Wyss attacks and five go with him — Gogl, Lampaert, Lagutin, Conti and Laengen — the rest cooked after a long, hot day out front.

3. 3At the line

   Conti wins by half an hour

   Valerio Conti, who had looked to be struggling, surges away alone on a series of steady climbs and takes the biggest win of his young career. The peloton, granted a day of grace before the Pyrenees, rolls in 33:55 later — one of the biggest gaps in modern racing.

The result