Tour de France 2011: stage 14 – live! | Paolo Bandini

• Hit F5 for the latest or select the auto-refresh button below • Watch video highlights of every stage from the race so far • Check out our brilliant interactive guide to the 2011 race • And email your thoughts to paolo.bandini@guardian.co.uk • You can even follow Paolo on Twitter, if that’s your thing 12.05pm: All the riders are now over the Portet d’Aspet, but we already have a significant breakaway, with a group of 20 having escaped early on and already established a gap of almost five minutes from the peloton. The group is made up of Linus Gerdemann, Jens Voigt, Gorka Izagirre, Bauke Mollema, Luis-Leon Sanchez, David Millar, Rémy Di Gregorio, Kristjan Koren, Maxime Bouet, Christophe Riblon, Xabier Zandio, Sylvain Chavanel, Sandy Casar, Mickael Delage, Arthur Vichot, Manuel Quinziato, Julien El Fares, Anthony Charteau, Egor Silin and Marco Marcato. Stage 14: Saint Gaudens to Plateau de Beille Morning folks. It’s a grey, grim day here in central London, but the sun shines brightly over the Col de Portet-d’Aspet in south-west France, where the peloton is right this moment attacking the first of today’s summits. Make no mistake, today is A Big Day for this year’s Tour – perhaps the most significant stage yet in sorting the wheat from the chaff, the potential winners from the inevitable losers. The stage profile is unrelenting. At a glance it resembles an extreme parody of the ‘calorie burn’ setting on the stationary bike at your local fitness centre: incline after incline after incline – each one raising higher than the one that preceded it. They are punctuated only by the briefest stretches of level ground. In all there are five rated climbs, with gradients rising as steep as 10%, and the stage finishes with a 15.8km grind at 7.9% up to the Plateau de Beille. There we will see what Cadel Evans, Sammy Sanchez, Ivan Basso, Alberto Contador and the Schlecks are truly made of. On each of the four previous occasions that the race has climbed to the Plateau de Beille, the victor has gone on to win the whole Tour. Anyway, more updates shortly, but in the meantime, why not check out our video highlights from Stage 13, as Thor Hushovd roared to victory and Jérémy Roy suffered further heartbreak in the Pyrenees. Tour de France 2011 Tour de France Cycling Paolo Bandini guardian.co.uk

Posted by on July 16, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.