Further Tour Notes

A few loose ends and tangential observations.

The actual presentation lacked riders but they’re not the Tour’s paying customers. Having more stars on stage would be a good thing in itself but if there were 20 more riders present we’d surely get 20 more versions of “it looks like a tough route but I’ve yet to sit down with my team to discuss plans for next year”.

Some of the riders present in Paris were there for their transfer to Tokyo and onwards for the Saitama criterium. It’s an exhibition event but this year didn’t have too much to write home about, past years have seen riders grapple with promising sumo wrestlers, or had manga artist Wataru Watanabe taking part (his works have sold tens of millions of copies, possibly more than the total sales of all other cycling books). The aikido session this year seemed more tame and playing the koto didn’t seem to hit any high notes either. The race was “won” by Biniam Girmay and like all exhibition events there’s significance in the finishing order. As said before it could be more coherent to have Saitama around the time of the Japan Cup, to have the city exhibition event and a hilly UCI race at the same time.

Flight 666
“Didi the Devil” was in Saitama as part of the show. He’s called “Uncle Devil” in Japanese. He’s on brand, even taking the long haul flight in his satanic costume which makes you wonder if fellow passengers have second thoughts as they make their way to the seats and spot him onboard?

Le rigeur
Back to Paris and the main attendees at the presentation are sponsors and politicians from the various tiers of regional government like mayors and presidents of regional assemblies. You could make a good argument the Tour hosts France’s third largest local government congress.

What are these politicians talking about? As well as getting photo ops for their local newspapers the big thing coming down the track is government spending cuts with the French finance ministry seeking five billion Euros of savings from regional and local governments. Cutting back on support for bike races is probably easier than paring back other services. The Tour is probably the last race to feel this though, it’ll be local races and amateur events first but the queue of 200-300 towns willing to host the Tour could still shrink.

Invitations and public relations
Among those queuing for the Tour in a different way are Uno-X and TotalEnergies. They showed up in numbers for the presentation as they compete for the final invitation at the Tour de France. Tudor surely have a place already given they can supply Marc Hirshi, Julian Alaphilippe and others.

Alaphilippe’s partner is Marion Rousse who works for ASO. You can see a conflict of interest when it comes to reviewing Tudor’s invitation… it’s not likely to change any decisions given Tudor’s promise. But in another world where Uno-X and TotalEnergies both very strong bids too it would look unusual.

One absence from the 2025 Tour will be those 8-5-2 second time bonuses. With one or two exceptions, maybe the Marie Blanque in 2023 (pictured), they’ve rarely added much to the race as the gains are small and besides come the mountains a breakaway is up the road to collect them but everyone contesting them is many minutes down on GC. The only place they could be meaningful in 2025 is during the first week on the climbs before the finish… but it’s all to easy to Tadej Pogaçar taking them and so donning yellow very (read too) early.

Staying with the northern section of the first week and its small climbs, from a blogger’s perspective one big point of interest is the roads that need to be reconned. Daydreams on wintry days about a trip to the Alps or Pyrenees has been part of the fun. Where to go this time? No new climbs and surprises. So a dawning realisation that the first week contains the unknown parts… but it’s a bit less fun to visit and getting the feel of a 1.5km climb can help for the day’s stage pick but probably won’t inform us too much on the overall outcome. It’ll be interesting to see if teams head for these stages too, certainly managers will drive parts but will riders come along too.

Talking of car journeys, the Tour will have a record amount of transfers, the distance between the finish of one day’s stage and the start the next and by some margin it seems. This is paradoxical for a route that stays in France although we have to go back to 1957 to find an edition without transfers where the race starts in the same town it finished before. In previous years Christian Prudhomme has spoken about trying to reduce transfers for environmental reasons and also to help fatigued riders get to their hotels quicker. Not in 2025.

A picture says a thousand words
Le Monde has done some data analysis of the Tour de France routes over the years and this is displayed in maps, the darker the tone the more frequent the visits. You can see the way the race lapped around France for many years, indeed visiting the border was part of the politics of it all. You can also see the Prudhomme effect as the race in recent years has skewed south of the Bordeaux-Strasbourg line in search of hillier terrain to provide more spectacle. 2025 is an exception to this.

Siesta time…
The flat land north of that line is where it’s too easy to glance at the route and write “it’s one for the sprinters”. Only this is shorthand for “tune in for the final ten minutes”. Worse for the race and TV viewers, the first two weekends see likely sprint stages. Short of inventing synthetic things like, say, lacing big time bonuses throughout the first 100km, it’s hard to turn a flat stage into a compelling watch, especially if Mother Nature won’t intervene with crosswinds.

…but less rest for riders
TV viewers might sigh at sprint stages but they can enliven other days because they also work as covert recovery days for GC contenders and breakaway specialists who can lurk in the peloton in order to better attack the next day. There’s much less of that in 2025 with the race flat to start with and then little rest for the second half.

In due course
Only the main mountain stages see the actual route unveiled in full at the presentation. If you’re really keen you can freeze-frame the presentation video during Christian Prudhomme’s speech to track the blue line tracing the course of each stage and so work out the exact route of each stage but it’s sleuth work. Otherwise as ever the full route is out in May once everything has been signed-off, it can take until March to get this done which is frustrating for anyone planning to visit. The Pyrenees look like a great spot for spectating with Luchon or Loudenvieille as obvious spots.

If you want to see the route for the Tours, men and women alike, for 2026 and beyond, look where Paris-Nice and the Critérium du Dauphiné go. It doesn’t follow that if one race or the other visits a place in March or June then it’s in the Tour the following year…but there’s real overlap. Typically hosting a start or finish for these races is dangled as a taster for being awarded a Tour start.

Old haunts
Looking further back it’s striking how many places have a historical reference, in Tour de France history that is. The race visits Rouen and passes a monument to Jean Robic, this commemorates the spot where in 1947 he attacked on the final stage to Paris to take the yellow jersey. Or Superbagnères, or Mont Ventoux and so on. It’s an asset available to men’s cycling for now as it can reach back to 1903 but in time the women will have their own stories.

The trick of a grand tour is that it can revisit these locations selectively. Paris-Roubaix or Lombardia will visit Pont Gibus or the Ghisallo almost every year so there’s not much more to write or broadcast about them. By contrast the Robic memorial last featured in 2012 so it won’t feel too repetitive for the media to cover it again and even Mont Ventoux is visited reasonably sparingly. Now many fans want sport or scenery rather than sepia but the Tour is adept at supplying the extra black and white content on top.

Old news?
A year ago the presentation also saw the One Cycling in the news as Reuters got a scoop on the project. A year on? Nothing in the news but apparently it’s still in the works, just on the same scale as before without all teams on board nor all the races.

Finally there’s not just the Tour. The Giro presentation should be next but it’s been postponed for reasons unknown. As mentioned here before the grande partenza has been linked to the Italian government’s policy to ferry migrants to Albania for internment in Italian-run camps. This scheme was ruled against by Italian courts but the Italian navy is sailing to Albania for a second time so if the policy is back on, is the Giro start? Ideally this would not be the question, the start of a major bike race shouldn’t be linked to government policy that has nothing to do with cycling. Perhaps it isn’t… with talk today that there are still negotiations over the start relating to “economic issues”, ie money.

Reading Albanian news websites in recent days for any clues to the Giro – there are none, the sports sections are 98.5% soccer – has been, well, hectic with assassinations, extradition cases and more. Ex-President and opposition leader Ilir Meta congratulated Donald Trump on his election win… from his jail cell. The Giro can help show the countryside of course but in the meantime the state of politics there might help explain why the Giro’s start isn’t nailed down.

17 thoughts on “Further Tour Notes”

  1. Take it with a pinch of salt, but as I had suggested before, Cicloweb an excellent cycling news website (Italian only), plus fans from La Flamme Rouge editor and tracker, have done their apprentice sleuth homework and provided possible or even probable routes for all the stages, as it is based on the presentation videos, not mere conjectures. You can check it out here:

    https://www.cicloweb.it/news/10829073926/presentato-il-percorso-del-tour-de-france-2025-tutte-le-altimetrie

    – – –

    Women cycling also’s already got a nice baggage of stories, perhaps not one century back buy easily a handful of decades. But selective memory is a serious issue when women history is concerned.
    A tricky narrative you can find across several fields from art history to literature to, well, cycling sounds like this:
    “Oh, back then in the past women had no option at all, or they were miserable anyway, so doing the hard work in order to dig back any success story is just too close to wasting your time – barring of course those established icons we can cite every single time to comply with our equality dues (yeah, those we can easily find on Wikipedia). Women history is really starting, well, just now. We’re finally behaving good. From now on, I mean”.

    But it’s very easy to notice how current memory is brutally labile when women are concerned. Pogi’s Worlds 100-km attack was generally presented as shocking and unprecedented, but only few people pointed out that AVV had done the same like 5 years before. Not about comparing performance or whatever, just that the “similarity-within-exceptionality” was so bright that you’d have thought it was going to be an obvious reference. Nope. Just 5 years.

    – – –

    I’m not the most likely defending lawyer for such a Leblanc-style route, yet I think it’s more like Classic Vegni from some years ago, i.e., 10 days with no really hard stage, not even “middle mountain” ones, but a good deal of options for some lively action all the same. Barring perhaps the Vire stage, the hilly finales come after 20 to 30 kms of rolling terrain which *should* provide something interesting to watch. Of course, it’s *not* every stage (and, yes, Lille or Dunkerque still are probable snooze fests until the very finish line, plus, yes again, the weekend with stage 8 and 9 designed like that defies any logic), but we might get some decent 30-minutes blocks of cycling even before the second half of the TDF is on. That said, I totally agree with your observation above, the 2nd week might offer literally breathless racing as we’ve seen few times in recent years (the TDF had become hostile to having 3 hard days in a row…), and the 3rd week albeit more traditional will have much more tired legs facing it.

    – – –

    Finally, my experience with cuttings of money for local administrations and cycling is that it’s a huge issue because you suddenly may lose a great part of that “queue”, as many candidate towns find themselves well away from the budget needed, full stop. The impact is modest on rich destinations, but the distribution of wealth even among towns isn’t homogenous and many, especially among those interested in cycling, are on the small wallet side. Plus, of course, it’s not just about host towns, you also have public money flowing into and through TVs, roads, security etc. The good news for cycling is that once some minimum standard are defined, you can get creative and have a great race all the same. After all, the Giro put together some of its best editions under dire financial circumstances following the various & multiple “crisis” late capitalism had to offer in recent years. Obviously, the lighter & more sustainable you are, the easier to keep things going more or less as usual. If you’re big & heavy, you must be ready to live on your “fatty resources”, so to say. For all the comparisons between “business models”, it’s not like in football some teams didn’t go bankrupt when things got tight…

  2. Thank you for those maps. A noticeable white line between the Jura and Paris in the most recent one. The only time these départements see the Tour is as the TGV rushes through them for the final day transfer, 2025 included.

  3. Re the siesta stages, I thought we had all agreed the sprint stages are where the actual interest and novelty are these days? All we need is for them to scrap the 3km rule so we get full on stampedes into town again.
    Also, I had missed Hirschi signing for Tudor.

    • On a more serious note, I think we need some “How did the riders to watch fare in 2024?” or “Best 5 races in 2024” etc.
      Especially the latter might be as much compelling as conflictive. Was the Flèche good or terrible? Was TDF exciting or utterly boring? Was Sanremo sparkling or a World Champion playing negative racing for a teammate isn’t that good? Was the Giro great because we saw Pogacar losing a race (stage) he was trying as hard as he could to win, or was it unsatisfactory because we soon saw that even in that far from perfect physical condition no serious challenge could be posed? Even the Worlds which I consider great haven’t been liked by everyone, not to speak of Roubaix and Ronde.

      (Olympics men and women are undisputed I think, just as Giro Donne and TDF Femmes.)

      • Yes, Gabriele, so many talking points, cannot wait for these blogs – no pressure Inrng. This has been a great season of racing AND a great season of blogging and this forum.

        It’s a great season of racing, I really think this was one of the most interesting seasons I’ve seen in a long time.

        Next year too should be another great season – Tadej might look invincible, but at each race he wants next year, someone else has beaten him before. 100% Jonas is going to be super motivated to come back strong at the Tour. Remco will be even stronger next year. Pick a Monument, and Tadej will have major competition. I’m also very strong believer that WVA is not done and he will come back very strong next year.

      • I would say Fleche was one of the better races of the year as it was a major race where the winner wasn’t plainly obvious before the race started, or at any stage in the actual race. We only knew Williams had won when he had won.
        For me next year I would settle for some sort of challenge to MvdP in the cobbled classics (possibly from Pogacar, hopefully from Van Aert too) and Vingo putting up a fight in the Tour. If we get to this time next year and at least a couple of Strade Bianche, Flanders, Roubaix, Liege, Giro, Tour, Worlds & Lombardy haven’t been a complete walkover for whoever wins, then I would consider that a relatively successful outcome. The one race where I would accept a Pogacar long range rampage would be Sanremo, for pure novelty value and to see if it is actually possible.

  4. Fleche was both great and terrible. Kind of awful to see some riders who just aren’t built for it, but cool to see the ones who are. Plus we had Uno-X vikings just rockin it like it was no big deal. Plus, if you look at the top 10 from that race it was a lot of guys that had great seasons.

    • Yeah, I share your POV, but as I (personally) consider the other races I name also great, in a way, I included Flèche as a case of potentially ambiguous or controversial judgement.

      Of course, I’m totally favourable to racing under those conditions, with proper support. But those events also expose the whole “rider safety” hipocrisy, as currently managed by the CPA.

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