This Wednesday the route of next year’s Grande Bouclé was announced, which will be held from June 29 to July 21, and for the first time in its history it will depart from Italy and include unpaved terrain. In addition, it plans to arrive in Nice for the last stage, which will be held five days before the official opening of the Olympic Games in the City of Light, the usual scene of the so-called “walk of the champions.”
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To avoid clashing with Olympic logistics, for the first time in 120 years the winner of the Tour de France will not be crowned on the Champs-Élysées. The peloton will pass through four countries in total, because there are stages in San Marino and Monaco apart from Italy and France, and the total gradient will be 52,230 meters, including a first-class port only in the fourth stage.
This is the ascent to Col de Galibier, located at 2,642 meters high, the second highest point to be reached in an edition that will include seven mountain stages and a total of four high finishes.
“The Tour peloton has never climbed so high so early,” said Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme, when presenting the route, on a stage that was attended by the two defending champions, the Danish Jonas Vingegaard and the Dutch Demi Vollering.
The route for the 111th edition of the Tour de France. 🤩
The 2024 edition will start in the Italian city of Florence and finish three weeks later in Nice.
Read the comments by Jonas and Richard. ✍🏼⤵️
— Team Jumbo-Visma cycling (@JumboVismaRoad) October 25, 2023
A journey full of nostalgia and innovations
The match in Italy will be spread over four stages, instead of the usual three that are held in the host country of the start. The first of them will start in Florence, and will be part of a tribute to the late Marco Pantani, because he will arrive in Rimini, where he died, while the second will start in Cesenatico, very close to his native Cesena.
The fourth section enters the high mountains while leaving the Italian roads. It is the first block of alpine stages, which includes the Col de Montegenèvre and the Col de Galibier as you enter France.
It will not be the last time that the Tour passes through the Alps, because it returns to that massif four days before closing, with two high finishes in Superdévoluy and Barcelonette.
Another great novelty is the “sterrato” of the ninth stage, a route through the Champagne vineyards that includes 32.2 kilometers on rocky roads in the style of the classic Italian Strade Bianche, and which becomes an unusual substitute for the cobbled sections .
Tribute will also be paid to the recently deceased Federico Martín Bahamontes, the first Spaniard to win the Tour de France, because stage 19 will touch the top of the Bonette, the roof of the race, at 2800 m, a pass that he crossed for the first time and which has very rarely been included in a layout again.
The penultimate section revives a fundamental moment of the Paris-Nice, on the way to the definition, because it reaches the Col de la Couilole at 1678 meters high.
But nothing as far from the usual as the final stage, which unlike the regular calendar could have an impact on the general classification, because it will be a 34 km individual time trial between Monaco and Nice.
This finish had not been seen since the 1989 edition, when Greg LeMond snatched the leader’s jersey from Laurent Fignon in that last duel, played on that occasion on the Champs-Elysées.
The Alpe d’Huez is the highlight of women
This Wednesday’s presentation also included the women’s Tour de France, which will begin in Rotterdam one day after the closing of the Olympic Games, on August 12, will spend a day in Belgium, and will extend until the 18th.
As in the men’s version, that last day there will still be a lot at stake, because the final stage concludes in the mythical Alpe d’Huez, which on this occasion is not part of the men’s route, but which for the first time becomes in the path of women.
It will be the second consecutive summit finish, because a day before, the peloton will have touched another essential mountain pass, Le Grand Bornand.
The route will include more mountains than any other edition in the brief history of the women’s Tour, which has barely 30 editions in its different versions since 1955, with long breaks for different reasons.
With AP and Reuters
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