Tour de France 2015: Riders ready to go flat out for last time

This team time-trial represents the last big chance for non-climbers to leave their mark on the outcome of the 2015 race

Alberto Contador's Tinkoff-Saxo will be one of the favourites for the team time-trial (Getty)

With three stages in the Pyrenees and four in the Alps to come, by common consent the contenders’ battle for supremacy in the mountains will have a greater influence than usual on the final outcome of this year’s Tour de France. But it also means that 12 July's team time-trial represents the last big chance for non-climbers to leave their mark on the outcome of the 2015 race – and they will be determined to make the most of it.

Running for 28 kilometres between the Breton towns of Vannes and Plumelec and taking roughly 35 minutes to complete, under “normal” circumstances such a short distance would not represent a major challenge for the overall contenders. But two factors drastically change that particular perspective.

12 July's route is exceptionally difficult, with barely a metre of flat, and running on twisting, often narrow, Breton country roads. The testing course culminates with a 1.5 kilometre climb up the Côte de Cadoudal, well-known and respected by the peloton given that they have to climb it no less than 11 times in the Grand Prix Plumelec-Morbihan, one of France’s longest-standing top one-day events. Even with dry weather, as is forecast for 12 July – and the subsequent reduced likelihood of crashes – the undulating roads of Brittany represent a tough challenge.

The second complicating factor is that rather than being in its usual stage-four slot, when squads are usually still fresh out of the starting blocks, the Tour organisers opted to put the team time-trial back to stage nine, at the end of a very hard (and in this year’s case, crash-ridden) first week of racing.

Teams will be correspondingly weaker, some already suffering abandonments and all with more sick or injured riders. And that increased vulnerability equals potentially greater time gaps than in the Tour’s last team time-trial in 2013, say, run over a similar distance and when all the favourites finished within 56 seconds.

A weakened squad is particularly important on a stage like a team time-trial, where collective strength is all, with teams’ times taken on the fifth rider of the squad to cross the line. Should they fail to stay grouped together because of a puncture or a rider dropping behind, that’s all part of the team time-trial game.

“Even if you’ve got two or three really strong guys who could really rip things up, you’re only as good as your fifth man, and in an ideal world, you’d have six in your line of riders at the finish, just in case,” Alberto Contador’s team sports director Sean Yates, a renowned team time–triallist when he raced in the 1980s and 1990s, tells The Independent on Sunday .

The final ascent will be critical in Yates’ eyes, and he argues that in the case of Contador – considered Chris Froome’s arch-rival – “we’ve got five good climbing specialists to be good for that and going up there hard with those five we could get some good time. Much more than in a completely flat team time-trial, anyway.”

Tinkoff-Saxo are one favourite for 12 July, but so, too, is Team Sky with Froome and BMC, defending world champions in this speciality. Afterwards, in such a mountainous Tour, it’s only climbing ability that will matter.