Tour de France 2018: Magnus Cort Nielsen wins stage 15 – as it happened

118km to go: Calmejaine is heading up the Col de Sié entirely alone. He has just over 1km to go.

121km to go: The breakaway is now 5min 39sec behind Calmejane, and being managed by Sky who have five riders at the front.

124km to go: Lilian Calmejane sets off on his own, at the front of the breakaway.

124km to go: Arnaud Démare may struggle to survive the day. He’s in a three-man group that is currently over 8min 30sec behind the leaders, and continues to fade.

126km to go: Van Avermaet is the highest in the GC standings among the breakaway 29, and he is 29min 2sec behind Geraint Thomas.

128km to go: “You missed an essential point,” sniffs Andrew Benton. “The Millau bridge was designed by a Brit - Sir Norman Foster, no less. Top Gear even had a three-men-in-three-sports-cars trip to see it a few years ago. Quite a bridge, by all accounts.” It is, as bridges go, pretty eye-catching.

130km to go: This break is big enough and strong enough to stick it out, you’d have thought. They have already built up a 3min 30sec cushion from the peloton. Greg Van Avermaet, Daryl Impey, Serge Pauwels and Bauke Mollema are all involved.

135km to go: There are 29 people in the breakaway.

136km to go: This screengrab catches the moment a group was allowed to go. Peter Sagan wasn’t in it then, but has since joined it.

137km to go: Movistar and Team Sky block the road at the front of the peloton for a while as perhaps 15 riders break clear at the front.

139km to go: The breakaway still hasn’t broken. Peter Sagan is at the front of the peloton, which is fully of people peeking over their shoulders, sizing up the position, and pondering their tactics.

146km to go: There have been lots of long, straight, flat roads of late. They haven’t helped the aspiring breakawayants in the slightest, as they haven’t been able to get out of sight of the peloton, and it’s all been so demoralising that now they’ve given up and are about to be caught.

148km to go: The next town on the route, still 15km away, is Belmont-sur-Rance. The Rance is a river. Not all that far from the Rance, near Pau, where the Tour passes on Thursday, is a town called Ance. Ance and the Rance are both, in more than one sense, in France.

152km to go: Julian Alaphilippe leads an attempt to catch up with the three at the front, and then Ion Izagirre takes over. The leaders are just 11sec ahead.

157km to go: The front three have a 15-second lead, but behind them it’s a bit of a mess: the GC favourites are all in the next group, but then there are 40 riders that are nearly two minutes back already, and finally three who are a couple of minutes behind them, and thus more than four minutes behind the leaders.

160km to go: Warren Barguil, Adam Yates and Gregor Mühlberger have now broken away at the front.

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162km to go: The leaders are heading downhill into Saint-Affrique, named after Saint Africus. According to Wikipedia he is “a saint about whom very little is known”. His tomb was in Saint-Affrique, or at least until it was destroyed by Calvinists.

167km to go: Perez has been caught. Meanwhile it seems that Démare and Guillaume Van Keirsbulck have been left behind, along with Jay Thompson who has the excuse of having had to change bikes.

169km to go: Anthony Perez is out on his own at the front of the race at the moment, but the breakaway remains unbroken.

170km to go: Two men break at the front, Julian Alaphilippe and Daniel Martinez, and they go over the top of the climb first and second.

The climb up the Côte de Luzençon is well under way, with Elie Gesbert at the front.

177km to go: Impressed as I am with the Millau viadcut, I’m even more amazed at how directors managed to get it into camera shot for the entire first half-hour of today’s broadcast. They have finally left it behind.

179km to go: Arnaud Démare is already being left behind, panting at the back, with Jack Bauer also toiling. Bauer’s team-mate Adam Yates is at the front.

181km to go: Thomas De Gendt is the first to take the lead, with the race starting with a gentle, 1.5km uphill section.

181.5km to go: And they’re off!

This is Millau’s newer bridge, which is ludicrously impressive.

I’ll do my best! I’m expecting quite a lot of early moves today.

The racing is due to start at 12.20pm BST, clock fans. The riders are just over 4km away from that point, crossing the older of Millau’s two bridges, which is cleverly known as the Pont Vieux.

The day starts with a short uphill section, and the first categorised climb starts after 6km and ends 9km in.

Hello world!

Today the Tour heads south towards the Pyrenees, covering a bumpy 181.5km heading south and west from Millau. Millau is twinned with Bridlington, twinning fans. There are three climbs of note, the category three Côte de Luzençon, the category two Col de Sié, and the category one Pic de Noire, making its Tour de France debut today. The stage seems set for some long-distance breakaway action, but time alone will tell. Here’s the top of the GC leaderboard as it stands:

And this is what today’s stage looks like: