Tadej Pogacar is poised to match the record for the most Tour de France wins as he takes a commanding lead into the final stage.
If Pogacar avoids a crash on Sunday's final stage to Paris, he will become the joint-most successful rider in the Tour's history alongside Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Indurain. The UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider finished the three-week Grand Tour's 'queen' stage in fourth place after helping his 22-year-old Mexican team-mate Isaac del Toro provisionally seal third place on the overall podium and the young rider classification's white jersey.
Pogacar will claim his fifth overall yellow jersey in Paris by six minutes and 26 seconds over Belgium's Remco Evenepoel of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, after Evenepoel finished the stage in second, 26 seconds behind Carapaz.
Richard Carapaz clinched victory on Alpe d'Huez in a dramatic stage 20 that saw Sepp Kuss crash twice while leading in the last few kilometres. The 2019 Giro d'Italia winner eventually took his second stage win in three days and also secured victory in the king of the mountains competition.
Carapaz, of EF Education-Easypost, swept past Kuss and into the lead after the American crashed coming out of a tunnel approaching Alpe d'Huez town. Kuss maintained his lead, but soon after crashed again on a right-hand corner after getting his line wrong, his rear wheel sliding on dust at the edge of the road before coming to a stop, half off his bike and leaning into safety netting which prevented him from falling down a sheer drop.
"I was not really scared," Kuss told TNT Sports afterwards. "I was just annoyed because we drove down it this morning and I looked at that corner and thought: 'Ah that's a pretty descent corner, no problem in the race,' so I took it pretty full-on. It was a bit more of a corner than I expected."
Pogacar held back to help Del Toro, who at one point was starting to struggle on the Col du Galibier, to defend his white jersey and third place overall from French sensation Paul Seixas of Decathlon CMA-CGM. The 19-year-old Seixas finally ran out of energy on the final mountain of the race and is set to finish fourth in the general classification, 11 minutes and 56 seconds down on Pogacar's overall time.
Race organisers ASO announced during the stage that Sunday's finale will have its distance reduced from 133km to 89km after the re-direction of emergency services to help tackle devastating wildfires in the south-west of the country.
Denmark's Mads Pedersen of Lidl-Trek will win the green points jersey in Paris on Sunday just by finishing as he leads Belgium's Jasper Philipsen of Alpecin-Premier Tech by an uncatchable 82 points.
In the end, it all comes down to Sunday's shortened 89km stage from Paris to Paris. The stage traditionally sees the sport's sprinters battle for the line on the famous Champs Elysees cobbles, but a new section over Montmartre allows riders with more sustained power the potential to steal a breakaway win.
Source: Yahoo Sports