The riders make the race, but what if the route is shite?

Ah it's probably not shite.

I am a busy man. Busy doing the best thing imaginable - compiling Tour de France stats for the telly. Today is the first time I’ve sat down and looked at the route of this year’s race properly.

Two things struck me.

The first is that the race is entirely in France. It is, after all, as Sean Kelly would say a ‘Tour of France’ so positioning itself entirely within that very same country shouldn’t be a big deal. It is. It doesn’t happen very often.

Over the past 40 years the Tour of France has only been a Tour of only France three times. The most recent was 2020. My first instinct, thinking back on it today, was that this must have been a decision shaped by Covid. Crossing borders for any reason had become a fraught and dangerous process so allowing a bike race and all that comes with it to cross willy nilly in and out of countries would have seemed like folly. We were all still unvaccinated at that stage. But my instinct was incorrect. I looked back and was surprised to discover that this had always been the plan. The route wasn’t tweaked or compromised. It was always Christian Prudhomme’s intention to plonk the entire 2020 race within France. When he unveiled the route he said “we believe we have created an exciting route, but it’s the riders who make the race” which he had definitely never said before and has definitely never said since.

Before that, the 100th edition in 2013 was held entirely within France although not entirely on mainland France. It started that year on the island of Corsica - the only one of the 101 prefectures in France which the race had yet to visit. What an occasion! Then the GreenEdge bus got stuck under the finish line.