Welcome back to the Lantan Rouge Cycling Podcast with Benji Nieson. We just watched stage 17 the Queen stage of the Twitter of France this year.

Not a lot of movement on G.C. but a lot of action on G.C there was still a fair bit of movement. It was actually better than I expected this stage.

Just a reminder of what the profile looked like. It was Pancake Flat for, I don't know about 88 kilometers. There was an intermediate sprint with 45.5Ks into the stage.

There was a short climb before then but not very steep. We didn't think that would

bother Bennett and Coe. And then the first climb of the day was the HC climb called de la Madeline, which is often one of the hardest climb in a mountain stage, but it wasn't today.

Then a descent and then a short valley and then they started the beast, the longest, the hardest, the highest climb of this year's

Tour de France, the Coeur de la Loise recently repaved some batshit crazy steep pinchers in this in the last five kilometers. We'll get to

them when we say what's happening at the end of the stage. 20k is at 7.5% up to

about 2,300 meters but that really belies how difficult that last 5 kilometers is,

which, yeah, average I think about over 10 percent, but with some like flat sections in it as well. So that was the stage.

Bernal, the big news before the day started. It once again, Inios releasing that news before like very early in European time

Bonal was not starting the stage

they didn't really say why we said to journalists yesterday

his back was playing up so who knows but he's recalibrating for the rest said to

Journalist yesterday his back was playing up so who knows but he's recalibrating for the rest of the season to use their language and I presume that means taking a tilt at the

Welter as co-leader with Chris Frum but but how did this stage start Benji?

Was it a fierce fight for the break or a bit different to previous days?

Yeah, a fierce start for the breakaway once again because we had so many attacks as always,

but it was different because at the start I thought a larger group would go away it

certainly looked like that but in the end that was not the case we had like a group of fatty split but that came

back together quite easily after the jumbo riders kind of said no to that and eventually

Some six riders got away juln al-A-Leflee for dique us the gunink We had Dan Martin for the digital startup nation.

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