There’s Less Climbing in Stage 2 of the Tour de France, But It Won’t Be Easy
Stage 2 - Perros-Guirec to M?r-de-Bretagne - 183.5km - Sunday, June 27
There isn’t quite as much climbing on Stage 2 as the opening day of the 2021 Tour de France, but it ain’t easy. Nothing in Brittany ever is.
Stage 2’s route is what the French call accidenté or, more colorfully, casse-pattes (literally: leg-breaking): 183.5km of constantly lumpy terrain, typically on small roads, through towns with lots of road furniture like bollards and roundabouts. It’ll make for a nervous day of racing, before we even get to the finish.
That finish, of course, is the M?r-de-Bretagne, a Category 3 climb that Tour organizers first used in 2011 and love so much the race has returned three times since. It’s clear why: it’s short (2km) but steep—its official gradient of 6.9 percent masks a hard initial ramp of 10 percent for a full kilometer.
As in the last visit here, in 2018, riders tackle it twice as part of a brutal finishing circuit. There’s a fast, slightly downhill run-in to the village and a preliminary ascent of a smaller, Category 4 ascent (the Cote du Village de M?r-de-Bretagne) to prime the riders for the first time up the Mur, and then a 15km circuit before the finish climb.
Expect another early breakaway as riders chase KOM points, and likely a twitchy, watchful peloton after Saturday’s awful and stupid crash where a fan mugging for the TV cameras brought down close to a third of the pack and ground the race to a near-halt. But things will definitely heat up in the final 20-30km as riders try to keep themselves up front and out of trouble.
Riders to Watch
Expect the GC riders to be active at the front on the finish. Gaps will be small to non-existent, but telling. In 2011 Cadel Evans took the stage, foreshadowing his overall win to come. And in each of the other two finishes here, the eventual winner was in the top 10. Stage threats include Pierre Latour of TotalEnergies who was active on Stage 1 and has been close-but-not-quite on this course in the past, and Alpecin-Fenix's Mathieu van der Poel, not to mention Stage 1 winner and yellow jersey Julian Alaphilippe.
Riders we can’t wait to watch at the Tour de France
When To Watch
Because it’s supposed to be another relatively calm day weatherwise—particularly by Brittany standards—we don’t expect crosswinds and echelons to be an issue. That should mean the race is in equilibrium between the break and the pack for much of the day, and backload most of the action into the final 20km or so, although, as we saw with Stage 1 and the crashes, that’s never assured. If your stream is loaded by 11AM Eastern, you should catch most of the fireworks.
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