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.