Alps or Pyrenees? The two mountain ranges are often juxtaposed by the Tour de France. Do you prefer one over the other?
If you do, chances are it’s the Pyrenees. Many cyclists cite the wilder feel, the older buildings, the roads that feel more irregular to climb, while the Alps have big ski resorts, crowded valleys and busy roads. It’s true in the sense yes the Alps have have big ski resorts, crowded valleys and busy roads but so do the Pyrenees. I’ll see your Maurienne ski resoirts and raise you with Andorra.
Just like the Pyrenees, the Alps have plenty of wilder corners with roads that weren’t built by bulldozers to pave access to a ski resort in the 1970s too. Only the Tour is often a poor prism to refract this back to TV audiences and this televisual psychogeography can distort the views.
This weekend’s stage to Alpe d’Huez is interesting as the main climb has As-Seen-On-TV celebrity but the Col de Sarenne gets some limelight, in part to persuade visiting cyclists to stay and try more roads in the area. If the Sarenne is rewarding for the scenery and solitude it still begins on the busy Col du Lautaret main road by the industrial Chambon dam.
There are plenty of quiet valleys in the Alps that offer tourists plenty of rural charm, cyclists get empty, irregular climbs… and residents struggle to access public services just like the Pyrenean clichés too. But these parts don’t host the race often, if at all. As a result they don’t seem to exist among the mythology of cycling locations.
Today’s stage passes many of these quieter corners. It rides into the Vercors, a spectacular part of the Alps, or pre-Alps if you’re a stickler for geology but only via a main road up and then back down rather than any of the spectacular cliff-hugging roads but it could still look good on TV. The Vercors has at least featured in the Tour but rarely. It is a quiet place, no mass tourism ski resorts and plenty of roads that started out as smuggling trails or forestry paths and then gradually got tarmacked. Once the race quits the Vercors it’ll take the training roads of Paul Magnier.
Nearby is another corner of the Alps called the Trièves which offers wide open spaces in the mountains and little in the way of mass tourism nor industry although it does now have a relatively new autoroute. Motorists have to pay but they get their money’s worth with the views along the way.
Later in the stage is the Champsaur, another corner of the Alps often passed by in the Tour. But illustrative as the race finishes in Orcières-Merlette, the name of the ski resort. Merlette, with its apartment tower blocks, is the aberration. But because the Tour visits it’s easy to remember this rather than all the side roads and smaller passes and nearby wilderness not seen on TV.
Indeed rather than juxtapose, if the Tour doesn’t show off all the Alps, it doesn’t do the Pyrenees justice either. It sticks to familiar haunts like the Tourmalet, Aspin and Soulor passes. Gavarnie was a novelty this year it’s just a turning away at the foot of the Tourmalet. So a similar selection bias is evident as the wilder parts of the Pyrenees don’t and even can’t host the race very often. This year’s stage to Les Angles touched on a relatively unexplored part of the eastern Pyrenees for the Tour but the race did not stay to range more. Similarly western parts in the Basque Country are even more unknown to the Tour despite having some of the hardest climbs in France, something that ought to be a draw for the organisers. But these areas are relatively remote.
Logistics play a big part. Alpe d’Huez can host 23 teams with their 28 bed allocation and supply parking to the fleet of vehicles every team brings. So can the city of Pau but it means the Tour struggles to reach smaller places.
One nerdy point on how Tour stages are hosted these days is that increasingly it’s a regional effort. Rather than one host town taking on all the costs, departments and regions are sharing the burden. This means a small and relatively poor town could get to host the race if there’s something to gain for the wider region. So the Col de Méhatché, aka Artazamundi, could feature one day if the Pyrenees-Atlantique council wanted to promote what many forums say is hardest tarmacked road pass in France.
And yes there’s more beyond France for the Alps and Pyrenees alike but that’s beyond a postcard from the Tour de France. But it does speak to the relative size of these mountain ranges, the Alps by virtue of being bigger in France alone offer a lot that goes unseen.
Today’s intermediate sprint in Corps comes a relatively flat part of the stage. But turn left and there’s the Col de l’Homme and beyond to the Notre Dame de la Salette sanctuary, perhaps too sacred for the profanity of sports event and never seen on TV at the Tour… but rewarding for travellers.
Sometimes one feels that it’s better if people simply don’t get to know. Sacrifice again and again the same sacrifice zones until a different model can really be developed and put in place to then expand, then and only then, the influence area of tourism. The apparently wise idea of broadening the tourism area to share both burdens and benefits hasn’t yet worked with any decent result in the places I know.
Wow, Notre-Dame de la Salette might be sacred but it looks like that gargantuan architecture is a necessary feature for Alpine buildings, or what?
It’s like Oropa… a comparison only made because the Giro has visited and put the climb to mind. But a wilder road with big open views, the building at the end is almost as much the aberration as the appartment towers above Orcières.
Maybe I’m being Italophile here, but Oropa to me, although quite colossal (and maybe even more so than this case), is a better result as an architecture and in its (still invasive) relation to the landscape.
Covadonga also comes to mind as an example, sort of in-between the above.
Of course as far as ski-station are concerned, cycling’s historical finishes of Aprica and Foppolo can sport as much ugliness as anywhere else in France.
Better results can be found in the Dolomites, of course, but also Livigno or the Bormio area could keep more of a decent low profile.
That said, great postcard so full of acute points – we’re getting used to these not-so-little treats, but worth noting and thanking all the same.
I suppose that Alpe d’Huez does not mind becoming the Tour’s very own alpine sanctuary – especially, it seems to me, in recent years in which it is almost becoming fetishized as THE climb and destination. Let them become the tourist destination and leave the other bits of the French Alps you mention remain undiscovered.