Altitude top-ups, recons, and down time – What are the yellow jersey hopefuls up to ahead of the Tour de France?

There are 10 days to go until the Tour de France, and it's now a game of finishing touches.

The big training blocks are in the bank, the key build-up races are done and dusted, and to a certain extent form for the Tour has been set – if not in stone then in rapidly-drying concrete.

But there is still room for a spot of fine-tuning, whether that's a final hit of thin air up at altitude, reconnaissance missions to key mountains, or simply down-time spent at home before a month of madness.

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With most riders expected to travel to the Tour de France next Tuesday, we take a look at how the big favourites are spending their final week of preparation.

Tadej Pogačar

The four-time winner has changed his plans, which at the time of writing are still up in the air.

Tadej Pogačar had been set to head up to Isola 2000 after completing his commanding Tour de Suisse victory on Sunday. The ski resort in the southern French Alps has been a customary final staging post for the Slovenian ahead of the Tour, providing a final burst of altitude stimulus – the '2000' refers to the altitude of the ski station, in metres.

However, Pogačar is currently at home at sea level in Monaco. That's largely because his partner, Urška Žigart, suffered a serious injury at the Tour de Suisse and Pogačar has prioritised being at home with her.

"The most important thing is that we stay together the next few days and we see how it is," he said.

Pogačar can obviously still train hard on hilly and mountainous terrain near his home – even Isola is only just over an hour from Monaco – but the trade-off would be the benefits of sleeping at altitude and spending time with key teammates like Isaac del Toro and Pavel Sivakov, who are there already.

Jonas Vingegaard

The two-time winner and three-time runner-up, who looks set to renew his rivalry with Tadej Pogačar, is currently in Tignes on an altitude training camp.

Tignes is a familiar stop for Visma-Lease a Bike, who have a permanent base set up at the 2,100-metre-high ski resort in the heart of the French Alps.

Vingegaard spent two weeks at home in Denmark after winning the Giro d'Italia, and travelled to France for the camp last Monday, where he was joined by most of his Tour teammates, several of whom came directly from the final stage of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

Curiously, Visma-Lease a Bike won't tell us exactly what date Vingegaard will leave Tignes, but he is expected to remain there until the end of the week. He has been building intensity with mountainous training rides and has been spotted on key climbs that will feature in the Tour.

While this Tignes camp is familiar enough by now, it's still a step into the unknown, with Vingegaard coming into the Tour on the back of the Giro for the first time in his career.

Paul Seixas

The French sensation is currently stationed up at Les Arcs, another French Alpine ski resort that comes with a number to indicate its altitude metres (1950).

Seixas travelled there straight after abandoning the final day of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes on June 14, and the crash that forced that exit seems to have had a knock-on effect on his preparations for the Tour de France.

Reports in the French press indicate that Seixas was limited to indoor training sessions at first, in order to minimise risks with his body still heavily bandaged. He returned to riding outdoors at the weekend.

Seixas will still gain the blood-boosting benefits of being at altitude but not being able to replicate real-life climbing conditions will have certainly been an inconvenience. What's more, his body will still have been in recovery mode, so his training load will likely have been downgraded accordingly.

There are also doubts surrounding the health of his teammates, with Decathlon CMA CGM cancelling a press conference in which they were supposed to announce their Tour team on Wednesday.

Seixas won't race the French National Championships on Sunday but that wasn't part of the original plan. Instead, he'll stay in Les Arcs until Saturday, returning home for a couple of days before travelling to Barcelona.

Remco Eveneopel

The double Olympic champion raised plenty of eyebrows when he scrapped the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes from his schedule, clearing a huge gulf between the Spring Classics and the Tour de France.

Evenepoel has filled it with a variety of training blocks, the main one being a near-three-week block in the Sierra Nevada mountains in May. He then returned to sea level to spend early June training from his second home near Calpe in south-east Spain.

This week, Evenepoel has been training in the French Alps. On Monday, he put in a 196km ride that took in a mammoth 5,000 metres of elevation gain. He did not tackle any of the climbs on the Tour route on that ride, even though he was on the doorstep of a couple of them.

Evenepoel returns home to Belgium in the middle of this week and in theory he should line up at his National Championships on Sunday, as required by the Belgian federation, although reports suggest he's set to find a way out and skip the event.

Florian Lipowitz

Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe have a leadership question mark and the other half of that duo alongside Evenepoel is Florian Lipowitz, who is currently on a top-up altitude training camp.

Lipowitz, who made the podium in a breakthrough Tour de France last year, won the recent Tour of Slovenia, which finished on Sunday. He went straight to Kühtai in the Austrian mountains, not far from the border with his native Germany.

Lipowitz' family moved to that part of Austria when he was a teenager, to facilitate his passion and talent for winter sports, and he still lives there, so the training camp is not far from his home. The camp has been described as a 'short training block' of a week in length.

Juan Ayuso

The Spaniard was an impressive podium finisher at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and is currently finalising his preparations at altitude in Andorra.

Ayuso and several teammates went straight from that race to Andorra, which sits between France and Spain, and not far from Barcelona, where the Tour begins on July 4. The team have planned a relatively long block of 12 days of altitude training.

"What's actually growing now is primarily durability, meaning the ability to maintain the same effort under a greater load," Lidl-Trek coach Josu Larrazabal told BiciPro. "Essentially, being able to sustain certain performances for longer and over more days."

Larrazabal also indicated that they will head to Barcelona earlier than most, with plans to spend time at the Montmeló motor racing circuit to get drilled ahead of the Tour's opening team time trial.

Oscar Onley

We don't have any official word from the team on Onley's movements this week, but he is understood to have returned to training relatively quickly after dislocating his shoulder at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

In fact, he removed the neck brace the race doctors had put on following his crash into a ravine, popped his shoulder back in and finished the stage. Even if he did pull out the next morning, that was a good sign.

Onley was also sick on that day, which didn't help, but he reportedly joined several of his Tour teammates at a pre-Tour training camp in the French Alps, where they reconned the two Alpe d'Huez stages.

We're awaiting confirmation but the signs are that Onley's preparation, while compromised, has not been totally ruined.

Tom Pidcock

Last year's Vuelta podium finisher is at home in Andorra, which rather conveniently sits at altitude.

Pidcock had to adjust his Tour preparation this year, scrapping his planned appearance at the recent Tour de Suisse due to illness. However, doubts surrounding his form were swatted aside with a fine victory in the Andorra MoraBanc Clàssica.

That race was practically on his door step, and came as part of a home-based build-up to the Tour. Pidcock will remain in Andorra for the rest of the week before making the short journey to Barcelona early next week.

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