• Full team guide to the race | Full stage-by-stage guide
• And you can drop John an email about this year’s race

190km to go: Not much happening, all together at the front, plenty of mugging for the camera by the riders, who are smashing along nicely. Up ahead, beckons the home town of Fausto Coppi, Italy’s finest ever cyclist. Learn about him here. Quite the life. He won Le Tour in 1949 and 1952.

200km to go: The word is that storms may crash the party at 2pm. The Italian region has been swamped by them of late. The peloton at the moment is the very opposite of stormy. No breakaway.

• Jonas Vingegaard responds to late Tadej Pogacar attack
• Kévin Vauquelin follows Bardet as French stage winner

Tadej Pogacar threw down the gauntlet to defending Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard, attacking in the hills ringing Bologna, to take the yellow jersey on stage two of the 2024 race.

“It was more important to test myself [than Vingegaard],” Pogacar said after taking the maillot jaune. “It’s good to be in yellow. You don’t say no to yellow.”

A second successive French victory was secured in Bologna on a day the two favourites went toe to toe in a late climb

125km to go: Here we go, a climb, the first of the day, all 2km of it, at a 7.5% incline. Jonas Abrahamsen, who began the day in polka dot, takes to the front with very little chasing going on, and takes the two points. What will that climb do to the peloton?

130km to go: At least it’s not one of those soggy tours so far. Emilia-Romagna looks a beautiful spot, and on towards Imola they go, scene of the 2020 World Championships, as won by Julian Alaphilippe.

• Sprinter hit by heatstroke and suffered from first climb
• Bardet wins stage but host of big names also struggling

Romance is alive and well in the Tour de France, but so is chaos and suffering. As Mark Cavendish was sweating like a dog and vomiting on the climbs on the first stage from Florence to Rimini, one of the peloton’s most popular riders and great thinkers, Romain Bardet, making his final appearance in a race in which he has twice come close to winning, claimed the first yellow jersey of his career.

If Bardet was in a state of disbelief at the finish, Cavendish and his Astana Qazaqstan team were just in a state. On the ropes almost immediately, the recently knighted sprinter toiled over the numerous climbs, and also lost his Italian teammate, Michele Gazzoli, who quit after 120km of the Tour’s first stage.

• Updates from the 206km opening stage
• Cavendish relishing one final tilt at stage record
• Team-by-team guide | Get in touch! Email Tom

188km to go: We have a breakaway, at last. Sandy Dujardin, Mateo Vercher (TotalEnergies), Frank Van Den Broek (DSM-Firmenich PostNL), Clement Champoussin (Arkea-B&B), Ion Izagirre (Cofidis), Valentin Madouas (Groupama-FDJ), and Matej Mohoric (Bahrain Victorious). Uno-X Mobility have missed this and are desperately chasing but to little avail so far.

192km to go: We have another group try to go away, Warren Barguil and Simon Geschke have been busy in the early stages but they are surely way too talented to be allowed in the breakaway.

• Manxman currently shares record with Eddy Merckx
• ‘I’m more ready now than I was last year’

Mark Cavendish’s final tilt at claiming a record-breaking 35th stage win at the Tour de France begins in earnest on Monday when he targets victory in the longest day of this year’s race, the 230km haul from Piacenza to Turin.

“I’m more ready now than I was last year,” Cavendish, who currently shares the record of 34 stage wins with the great Eddy Merckx, said on Friday afternoon. “I’m so happy I carried on, actually.”

Slovenian has taken over the sport since double Tour winner Vingegaard suffered horror crash in April

If the defending Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard overcomes both the lingering aftermath of a horror crash in April that hospitalised him for 12 days, and the rampant form of a seemingly invincible Tadej Pogacar, his will be one of the most remarkable wins in the race’s history.

The double Tour winner starts this year’s race, which begins in Florence on Saturday and ends in Nice on July 21 in extremis, his embattled team beset by illness and injury, his form uncertain.

• Authorities cracking down on hidden motors on bikes
• ‘This is a way to show that we really take this seriously’

The head of world cycling’s governing body has revealed his organisation will pay whistleblowers to come forward with evidence of hidden motors being used in the Tour de France and other major races. Hidden motors and electromagnetic wheels, costing about £200,000, are suspected to have been used in the professional peloton for several years.

David Lappartient, the president of the UCI, supported by the former US Homeland Security investigator Nick Raudenski, the UCI’s new head of the fight against technological fraud, is ramping up efforts to detect cheats.

Our in-depth look at every team, main riders to watch and the cast of characters racing through France this summer

• Stage-by-stage guide to this year’s Tour de France

Once a low-key Dutch cyclo-cross team, now the home of the best one-day racer plus the fastest sprinter in the business. Mathieu van der Poel, the reigning world champion and Jasper Philipsen, winner of the points prize at the Tour last year, dominated racing this spring winning three of five Monument one-day races. Ominously, Philipsen seems to have adopted the “race less, win more” approach which paid dividends for VdP last season: team owners the Roodhooft brothers have built a strong support squad around them with Søren Kragh Andersen and Axel Laurance both capable of winning on their day.

• Geraint Thomas ‘super excited’ by ‘strong team’
• Tom Pidcock hoping to repeat stage win from 2022

Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos Grenadiers will start the 2024 Tour de France much as they have other recent Grand Tours: hoping for the best from their nominated team leaders, but ready to call for backup from Geraint Thomas and Tom Pidcock, if needed.

With the Giro d’Italia winner Tadej Pogacar seemingly in invincible form, the years have long gone when, as Team Sky, the British squad started the world’s biggest bike race as the team to beat.