The 2024 Tour de France concludes Sunday but won’t illuminate the ‘City of LIghts’ with a finish on the Champs-Élysées in Paris for the 111th edition. Instead, the Grand Tour will culminate along the Promenade des Anglais and Place Masséna in Nice on the Mediterranean coast.
Several arduous, relentless days of climbing come to an end with the individual time trial on stage 21. Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) padded his overall lead, yet again, with his fifth stage victory on Saturday and made it a clean sweep of all five high-mountain stages at this year's race. The ITT on Sunday has several climbs, so will the Slovenian make it a sixth stage win en route to a third career GC title at the Tour?
A total of 140 riders will try to keep Pogačar from another stage win, all taking the start ramp from the Formula 1 start grid in Monaco. The route will climb La Turbie (8.1km at 5.7%) and the summit of the uncategorised Col d'Eze (1.6km at 8.1%) before a long but technical descent into Nice. The final five kilometres will follow the Quai des Etats-Unis, follow the Promenade des Anglais for a U-turn back along the French Riviera and finally turn left for the finish in Place Masséna.
Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) will be among the final riders to take the course, and clad in the rainbow stripes as World Champion will look to repeat with a time trial victory he took on stage 7. He will need to fire on all pistons to hold off Pogačar for a second time, as there were only 12 seconds separating them in the last ITT outing.
This time, the Olympic champion in the race against the clock, Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) who was third on stage 7, won’t be in the mix as he departed the Tour before stage 13 due to injuries sustained on the previous two stages.
Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), who won the Tour’s hilly time trial last year on stage 16 and was fourth on this year’s only other time trial, will be motivated on Sunday, keen to retain his 2:50 margin over Evenepoel for second place overall.
Davide Ballerini (Astana Qazaqstan) will take the course as the first rider, the start at 14:40 local time. He will be followed by teammate Mark Cavendish. The first 70 riders will be spaced by 1:30 on the hilly route, then starting with rider Kobe Goossens (Intermarché-Wanty), the second half of the field will have two-minute intervals. The top 10 will take the course between 18:27 and 18:45 local time.
