Tour de France 2025 live: Stage 10 start time and route updates as GC contenders do battle on Bastille Day – UK Times

156km to go: Julian Alaphilippe leads us onto the day’s first classified climb, the cat-two, 4.1km Cote de Loubeyrat. At 6.3% it’s fairly short but punchy.

The Frenchman is being reeled in slowly by Bruno Armirail, on the front for Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, while at the other end of the bunch, the sprinters are already being spat out the back.

Alaphilippe’s sports director comes on over team radio and essentially tells him not to put in too much effort too early.

158km to go: That eight-man group has been brought back, but Lenny Martinez is on the prowl, looking around for the right moment.

The riders are climbing already, and Julian Alaphilippe gives the French something to cheer about as he sets off on the attack too. The veteran has 17 seconds on the peloton at the moment, and eight seconds or so on a small group of chasers.

162km to go: As expected, there’s an attack from the moment Christian Prudhomme waves the flag from his open-top Skoda. Victor Campenaerts is the main aggressor and that’s Visma-Lease a Bike setting out their stall today. Tim Wellens closes it down with ease.

Krists Neilands, a former Latvian national champ, is the next to go, and looks around for some company. Frenchman Valentin Madouas is doing his best to chase across.

Arkea are next to have a dig, Bahrain-Victorious are active too with Matej Mohoric and Lenny Martinez up there.

Stage 10 is officially underway!

Is today going to be manic? Everyone thinks so, the question is, will a breakaway manage to hold off the GC, or is Pogacar simply impossible to stop?

Anders Mielke of TNT Sports tries to get something out of Jonas Vingegaard too, but the Dane is also reluctant to be drawn. Asked if Visma are cooking something up, he laughs and says, “The whole Tour is cooking about today, it’s the 14 July, it’s the national day in France, everybody wants to be in the break, probably, it’ll be a very hard stage.

“My plan is to spin the legs in the neutral start, I haven’t been on the rollers yet.

“I know [the climbs] pretty well, I did a recon here in the end of April. It will be a very hard day, up and down all day, no flat metres.”

Will Visma make it even tougher? That seems to be their MO at the moment, but I’m not sure how much making the race difficult actually hinders Pogacar, or whether it actually works to the Slovenian’s advantage. Either way, it’s poking the bear, which doesn’t seem wise.

The riders are rolling out in Ennezat for today’s depart fictif, 8.3km of neutralised start before the brutal slog through (mostly up) the Massif Central begins.

TNT Sports try to get some info out of Tadej Pogacar before the start of today’s stage is Ennezat, but the yellow jersey isn’t there to provide anything juicy. “We will see,” he says when asked how UAE plan to ride, “we can decide after a few climbs, we can see if we’re riding strong or not. Today we need to stick as a team and we need to recalculate after the first few climbs. We are ready for today.”

It’s Bastille Day, and there’s nothing the French contingent would love more than to win a stage today.

The most recent rider to do so was Warren Barguil, who won stage 13 of the 2017 edition, besting Nairo Quintana and Alberto Contador to the finish in Foix at the end of another mountainous day.

The likes of Jacques Anquetil, Henri Pelissier, and Richard Virenque have all won on Bastille Day… can one of this Tour’s 35 remaining Frenchmen follow in their footsteps today?

Warren Barguil himself is racing this year too, riding for Picnic-PostNL, whose young Scottish rider Oscar Onley I’ve tipped for the win today.

In years gone by this would have been an ideal breakaway stage, packed full of climbing but not quite difficult enough for the general classification contenders to be tempted… but that’s without reckoning with the marauding Tadej Pogacar.

With it being Bastille Day, the likes of Aurelien Paret-Peintre (brother Valentin is on support duty for Remco Evenepoel, which rules him out) and Valentin Madouas might be set loose in a bid for a rare French victory; the terrain is probably not tough enough for Lenny Martinez, but he might have a dig too. Kevin Vauquelin is the most in-form of the French climbers but is likely too close on GC to be allowed up the road.

Could this be one for French veteran, breakaway stalwart and fan favourite Julian Alaphilippe? Or even his fellow elder statesman Warren Barguil? One can only hope.

Hedging my bets here, but if it comes down to a GC battle, Oscar Onley has a fourth place and a third place to his name already on the punchier stages and is a real climber. It may yet be the young Scot who breaks French hearts – if it isn’t Pogacar himself.

1. Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) in 33hr 17min 22sec
2. Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) +54”
3. Kevin Vauquelin (Arkea-B&B Hotels) +1’11”
4. Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) +1’17”
5. Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) +1’29”
6. Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-Lease a Bike) +1’34”
7. Oscar Onley (Team Picnic PostNL) +2’49”
8. Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) +3’02”
9. Primoz Roglic (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) +3’06”
10. Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek) +3’43”