Adam Yates will wear the famous yellow jersey for the first time in his career – the ninth Briton in Tour de France history to do so – when he takes to the 191km route from Le Teil to Mont Aigoual on Thursday’s stage 6, though he will face a battle to keep it through to Friday and beyond.

The 28-year-old Yates inherited the jersey from Julian Alaphilippe after the Frenchman was hit by a 20-second penalty for taking on food inside the final 20km of stage 5, which was won by the brilliant Belgian Wout van Aert.

“I don’t think anybody wants to take (the yellow jersey) like this,” said the Team Ineos-bound Yates, winner of the best young rider in 2016. “I was on the bus, showered, waiting for the last few guys to shower and somebody called the (sports) director to tell him I had to go to the podium.”

Even so, it is Yates’s jersey to defend now, and he will have to do it on what is relatively flat and simple day up until the finish. Just before the final 8km drag comes a gruelling 12km ascent to the Col de la Lusette – not a climb where the Tour will be won and lost, but certainly a place to lose time and make crucial inroads for those riders feeling good near the top.

The reigning champion Egan Bernal will hope to keep pace with race favourite Primoz Roglic this time after the Slovenian broke clear to win stage four, while Roglic may eye the yellow jersey and a chance to assert his authority on this overall race.

A break is likely to get away in the early part of the day but it could well be reeled in on the final climb, setting up a battle between the general classification contenders. If it doesn’t get caught then the stage winner could be any number of riders out of overall contention, though they will need some climbing legs to seize the day.

Even if the break isn’t caught, there will still be a fight among the big hitters, who may need to lean on their most dogged domestiques as the gradient kicks up. Yates insists he is not interested in the GC race and says he came here simply to pick off stage wins, but he is a marked man now and he will not want to give up his newly found treasure without a fight.

Watch stage 5 highlights:

The stage is scheduled to start at 11am BST (12pm local time).

Stage six will be broadcast live in the UK on Eurosport 1 and ITV 1.

A breakout will probably get the job done here so how about Pierre Rolland, who hasn’t won a Tour stage for eight years now. Then again he is close enough to the top of the standings to take the yellow jersey and might not be allowed to challenge. In that case a rider like Winner Anacona would be well-suited to this kind of finish if he can get himself in amongst the contending few. He’s never won at the Tour but his single Grand Tour stage win, at the 2014 Vuelta, came on a similar mountainous profile.