PREVIEW | Tour de France 2025 stage 15 - Will Pogacar be tested on explosive hilly day?

Stage 15 of the Tour de France will be an interesting day of racing, as the peloton begins to move away from the Pyrenees and go into an hilly and explosive day. We preview a day that can end in a reduced peloton sprint, breakaway and we can even see some GC action.

A day that would on paper be for the sprinters but the Tour organizers have made it as hard as they could. A breakaway can very well succeed on this final day of the second week, as the route into Carcassonne features two difficult climbs in it's middle and a relatively downhill finish.

A flat start, so ultimately it won't be easy to escape the peloton, but a lot can happen later in the day regardless of what happens early on. With 80 kilometers to go ends a climb of 10 kilometers in distance, the first 6 at around 6%... But it's the second one where a lot can happen.

Pas du Sant, with it's 3 kilometers at 9% (and the following 11 kilometers which average around 3%) are very hard. In the first section hard attacks are impossible to control for a sprinter-team-led peloton, if they want to keep the fast men and domestiques present. If the pace is easy, any escapee group can actually increase their lead, so it's hard to balance it out. But even after the end of the tough part of the climb, the effort continues on for quite a while and there is a very real chance that some riders may try and set off in pursuit of victory.

All the climbing ends with 52 kilometers to go, and the riders lose 700 meters of altitude until the finish, it will take around an hour or less and chasing will be very hard if there is a strong group in front. The finale in Carcassonne, if it comes down to a sprint, won't be very technical and it will be completely flat.

This will likely be a day for the breakaway with dozens of riders trying to get into the front group. Whether there will be GC attacks or not may depend on Visma's intentions, as they may want to continue attacking and trying to fatigue and/or create opportunities to surprise Tadej Pogacar.

There are some sprinters who can climb and some teams would be willing to control the break, but it would require a modest breakaway and that's not overly likely as there are no overwhelming favourites for such a stage. It's a very very open stage, because it fully depends on breakaway composition and it's impossible to predict how that will be.

*** Romain Grégoire, Quinn Simmons, Bruno Armirail
** Ben Healy, Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert, Mauro Schmid
* Tadej Pogacar, Matteo Jorgenson, Sergio Higuita, Alex Baudin, Jonas Abrahamsen, Simone Velasco, Harold Tejada, Harry Sweeny, Victor Campenaerts, Julian Alaphilippe, Axel Laurance, Neilson Powless, Tobias Foss

Pick: Quinn Simmons

How: The form is perfect and the American champion is incredibly strong. A victory is inevitably incoming and this will be a day that will suit him very well.