As the first part of a series to explore the famous roads of cycling, here is the Alpe d’Huez in France. The idea with this weekly series is to discover the road and its place in the world, whether its part in cycling’s folklore or to explore what it is like on a normal day without a race.
Alpe d’Huez is first as it’s one of road cycling’s most famous routes, an Alpine theatre that has become famous and even had books written about it. Next summer the Tour will climb the road twice in one day.
But for all its fame, this is a new climb that only gained in notoriety during the 1980s where began to feature almost annually on the Tour’s route.