Tour de France 2017: Stage 6 preview

After the Vosges, stage 6 is an uncomplicated run between Vesoul and Troyes. This is what's known as 'La France Profonde' – deep France. La France Profonde is cultivated, rural, stable, sparsely populated, topographically unexciting and tricky to define. It's what links the many varied provinces of France, the glue that holds the regions together.

There'll be little to challenge the peloton in this particular part of La France Profonde. A pair of small climbs won't stretch the peloton so much as the sapping 'French flat' – the straight roads which rise up and over the undulations in the landscape. There's a sprint at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, the home of President Charles De Gaulle, the father of the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle himself described this region as "vast, rough and sad; woods, fields, crops and melancholy wasteland" with "quiet villages in which nothing has changed for millennia". Perhaps he, too, had sat through one too many long flat Tour stages through terrain like this.

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