One year before the celebrations of the centenary of the yellow jersey, the Tour will pass through Grenoble where the mythical distinctive stuff was first presented to Eugène Christophe in 1919.
It's the way for the riders to go from the Oisans valley to the Rhône valley after three hard days in the Alps.
There's no transition day at the Tour without a breakaway but even though it's another relatively short stage (169.5km), sprinters teams shouldn't miss their sixth opportunity to deliver (after stages 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8) their fast men all together.
Valence is a crossroad between Lyon and Marseille, also between the Alps and the Pyrenees, but interestingly, the starting town of the Critérium du Dauphiné this year (with the victory of Michal Kwiatkowski in the prologue) has hosted the Tour de France on two occasions only: in 1996 with a winning breakaway and the friendly triumph of Colombia's Chepe Gonzalez and in 2015 when André Greipel won the third of his four stages, on the opposite direction though, coming from Mende.
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