Leopold König produced another splendid ride in the Tour de France when he rejoined the Nibali group on the descent and moved into seventh in the overall standings. Having initially started the stage with a defensive approach, the Czech ended as one of the big winners.

The longest stage of this year’s Tour de France was held today, after the second rest day. The peleton had 237 kilometers to cover on the route from Carcassonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon. As expected, a large group was able to break away and fight it out for the day’s win, and eventually Michael Rogers (Saxo - Tinkoff) triumphed as a solo attacker ahead of Thomas Voeckler (Europcar) and Vasil Kiryienka (Sky). This sixteenth stage had no bearing on the top of the overall rankings, meaning Vincenzo Nibali is still the man in the yellow jersey. However, Leo König was able to improve again and now goes into the coming two Pyrenees stages in seventh place.

“We're moving up, bit by bit! Hats off to Leo – this was another very strong race from him. We really didn’t think there would be an attack on the final climb. Our plan was to ride this stage with the aim of saving Leo’s strength and to get him a very good position for the final ascent so that he could be up among the favorites. He and the entire team managed to admirably put this into practice. Leo was able to keep pace with the best and has moved up further in the overall rankings, which makes us even more optimistic now for the coming two days”, was how Enrico Poitschke summed things up after the sixteenth stage.

At 124 kilometers, tomorrow’s seventeenth stage may be a very short one, but with three category-one mountain classification and an HC-category final climb, it's profile is very demanding.