Watch: Tour de France stage 17 highlights

Stage 17 of the Tour de France was the Queen stage of this year's edition. With over five 5,000m of climbing, including the 28km Col de la Loze, the day was sure to produce gaps in the general classification. Those on the fringe of the top GC places would be looking to find their way into breakaways to shoot their way up the rankings whilst those in higher places would seek to solidify their position. With the difficulty of the course, however, came the promise that the winner would have to be one of the best climbers in the world.

Before the big final climb, a large break had made it up the road and had a healthy gap that was around the three minute mark at the start of the ascent. Driving the break was a mixture of AG2R-Citroën, Bahrain-Victorious and Jayco-AlUla as they looked after the interests of Felix Gall (AG2R-Citroën), Simon Yates (Jayco-AlUla) and Pello Bilbao (Bahrain-Victorious) who were all battling for top spots in the GC and the stage win. On the climb, Gall proved to be the strongest, accelerating away from the diminishing breakaway and soloing to the win ahead of Yates and Bilbao.

Behind in the race for the yellow jersey, it was curtains for Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) as he was visibly struggling with still over 7km to climb up to the summit of the Col de la Loze. With laboured pedalling and his jersey unzipped, Pogačar’s contest was finished. All that was left for Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) to do was to try and chase the stage win. While he made serious inroads on the steep climb and descent to Courchevel, he wasn’t able to catch a flying Felix Gall. Nonetheless, his overall Tour victory was all but confirmed, with his lead over Pogačar now extended to 7:35 with four days left to ride.