Tour de France: LeMond urges Sky to attack tired Aru

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Having taken the yellow jersey of Fabio Aru's shoulders, Greg LeMond, a three-time Tour de France winner, is urging Team Sky and Chris Froome to press home their advantage. Froome turned his six-second deficit to Aru into a 18 second lead after the sharp finale into Rodez to secure his second stint in yellow at the 2017 Tour.

Aru now sits second on the general classification with Romain Bardet (AG2R-La Mondiale) third, five seconds back.

LeMond, who works for broadcaster Eurosport during the Tour de France, told the Reuters news agency that if he was in Sky's position, he would make the start of stage 15 as hard as possible for Astana and Aru.

"If I was Sky and I saw Aru today, I would go right from the gun tomorrow and see what happens," said LeMond. "There is one climb right away [Montée de Naves d'Aubrac] so I'd go with Michal Kwiatkowski, Mikel Landa and Chris Froome and see what happens."

Froome moved into yellow on stage 5, where Aru took the stage win, and held the leader's jersey through to stage 12 when Aru moved into the lead. With Astana losing Dario Cataldo, then Jakob Fuglsang to injury, LeMond added that he sees the Kazak squad lacking the strength and depth of Team Sky.

"It looked like Aru was suffering he had no team mate around him. It looks like he is tired and the team is not doing good either," LeMond said. "Aru was way back coming into the last 2km, I couldn't believe he wasn't up front. He lost quite a bit of time for nothing."

While the time loss puts Aru, a Vuelta a Espana winner and two-time Giro d'Italia podium finisher, on the back foot LeMond added that  "The pressure is off now that he does not have the yellow jersey. The yellow jersey does something to you. It's a lot of requests."