Another round of the breakaway world championships.Spectacle Sone et lumire: the month-long heatwave in France is ending. Among the complaints, one has been difficulty sleeping at night given the persistent high temperatures. Stage 12 did not help anyone hoping for a languid siesta in front of the torpor of a Tour sprint stage.A flurry of attacks showed intent from plenty to get away while the sprinters teams played whack-a-mole to knock back each attempt to escape. It worked andBaptiste Veistroffer went clear, almost too strong as he went solo and nobody joined him, no threat to the sprinters.If the curtain fell down on the peloton anyone hoping for 40 winks was disturbed by the intermediate sprint where Mads Pedersen sprinted across to the right and after a enquiry that saw his team convoked to the jury car and them him too, he was lucky not to get relegated.Soon after Ewen Costiou, Damiano Caruso and Matteo Vercher got across to Veistroffer while the peloton was in a long line for hours. If anything the bunch chased too hard as when the breakaway was caught this opened the way for more attacks. Lidl-Trek were firing riders forward.Mads Pedersen took a flyer and tiny Valentin Paret-Peintre, head tilting to the side as if wracked by severe torticollis, fought to thwart him. The moves kept flying and if they were desperate, that was half the entertainment.In the finish on the quays beside the Sone Fernando Gaviria overlapped his front wheel with Vlad Van Mechelen as he tried to squeeze into a gap and fell, causing many more to fall like skittles in a bowling alley. Van Mechelen got a yellow card and after leniency towards Pedersen further evidence that consequences weigh on the jury even if this not said aloud. Olav Kooij was luck to swerve around this but this put him out in the wind and with work to get back while Tim Merlier was able to kick for the line again to win. The average speed was 49.095km/h, no record but still in the top-10 fastest stages.Merlier gets his third stage, his Soudal-Quickstep team handling the post-Evenepoel era well and knowing Paul Magnier is waiting too.Merlier sits fourth in the points competition despite the scale being tilted towards the flat finishes, in part because hes been sitting out of the intermediate sprints. He told LEquipe the other day that in the sprint for the finish line he seems able to find more resources, mental and physical, than he can for a point along the way. In a post-stage interview he lamented how he came to road cycling late he was slopping around municipal parks of Belgium on the cyclo-cross scene with its euphemistic Super Prestige circuit and how this means he may have missed out on the Champs-Elyses sprint. Itll be interesting to see how many sprinters stay in the race now.The Route: 206km and 2,400m of vertical gain. This is the longest stage of the race.The intermediate sprint is in Mlisey, home of Thibaut Pinot of course. Its late in the route but which sprinters teams have an interest in contesting it to the point of trying to neutralise the race all day? Instead we might see some sprinters trying to infiltrate the breakaway and treat this as their virtual finish line.The Col des Croix is a regular road, a gentle introduction to the Vosges mountains.The Ballon dAlsace is 8.9km at 6.9% and very even with it, it feels as if the slope varies between 6.7% and 7.1% and all on a wide road. The matters as there are almost no tactical points along the way, even the hairpin bends are steady. Its a sub-25 minute effort today and so accessible to some.Theres a brief flat section over the top and 30km to go. The descent is even in slope but has many more hairpins and bends the first 5km on the way down before opening up. With 16km to go the descent eases and its onto wide, straight roads towards Belfort.The Finish: flat with a gentle downhill run past the fort that dominates the town. A right turn with 450m to go leads onto the finishing straight which bends gently and so the arch isnt visible until 280m to go.The Contenders: a good day for the breakaway, no sprinters can cope with the final climb, the teams with GC ambitions will hope to save energy here and theres no tale of revenge involving Tadej Pogaar and Belfort. So everyone else will want to crowd into the move and ideally a team identifies a winner to go in the move and sends a rouleur with them in support to help pull the break and close gaps later on.If Richard Carapaz (EF Education-Easypost) can get in the move hell be hard to contain on the Ballon dAlsace, and if not he can try tomorrow and leave team mates like Ben Healy, Alex Baudin and Georg Steinhauser to go for it.Movistar have numbers for the breakaway too, Raul Garcia Pierna, Pablo Castrillo and Javier Romo fit the bill on paper but even combined dont have the palmars seemingly required to land a stage win in this Tour.Quinn Simmons (Lidl-Trek) isnt a climber but go to Lombardia and he can handle 20 minute climbs well but go back to Stage 12 and see the efforts he was making.The climb today should be too long for Romain Grgoire (Groupama-FDJ) but if its not raced hard and means hes facing a 10 minute effort then hes got a chance.Luke Plapp (Jayco) has a great 20 minute power on tap, especially when theres no climb before but today will involve a lot of work and racecraft to make the break. Lennert Van Eetvelt (Lotto-Intermarch) is going well. Netcompany-Ineoss most suitable rider is probably Kvin Vauquelin but one factor that makes them harder to pick is the amount of punctures theyre having, from memory race radio announced three alone yesterday.Carapaz, PlappHealy, Grgoire, Baudin, Simmons, Romo, Tejada, Van Eetvelt, VauquelinWeather: sunshine and showers and a cooler 23C. The wind will blow from the west at 15km/h and could gust to 40km/h meaning a three-quarters tailwind for much of the stage. This wind direction is often the liveliest to split up the field as it whips the riders along and spreads them across the road.TV: KM0 is at 1.20pm and the finish is forecast for 5.25pm CEST.The post Tour de France Stage 13 Preview first appeared on The Inner Ring.