“We are not going to spend 21 days in the mountains.” This is what Thierry Gouvenou, the technical director of the Tour de France, assured Freed in the furnace of July, when the runners melted on the French roads. Not three weeks, of course, but not far: after a 2022 edition which relied on diversity and Instagrammable spots to shiver, traveling through three foreign countries (Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland), the Storebæltsbroen bridge, the cliffs of the Côte d’Opale, the cobblestones of the North, the shores of Lake Geneva or even the virgin Granon pass, the idea is very simple for the 2023 edition. A single border crossed, with the big start given in Bilbao, in the Basque Country Spanish, a climb up the coast to reach Bayonne before tightrope walking on the diagonal of the void. The Tour will skip the two halves of France, its universalism will take it to Moulins, the only prefecture which had never known its bombast, and above all, it will climb the five French massifs, excluding Corsica: Pyrenees, Massif central, Alps, Jura and Vosges.
With this steep route, does the Tour seek to reproduce the cliffhanger of the 2022 edition, during the Granon stage, described by some as a pretty page of heroism, when Vingegaard and the Jumbo-Visma had blown up defending champion Tadej Pogacar? To mark the return to Puy-de-Dôme, thirty-five years after his last visit, Christian Prudhomme also recalled the duel between Poulidor and Anquetil in July 1964. “A legend just waiting to live again”, said the boss of the Grande Boucle, during the presentation of the route, this Thursday at the Palais des Congrès in Paris. Failing to hope for a French winner – David Gaudu, the highest ranked tricolor rider in July, certainly came fourth, but nearly fourteen minutes from the winner – the desire for a new clinch between Pogacar and Vingegaard is reflected in the course shown. Next July, the Tour will already be propelled into Netflix orbit – in the spring, a documentary of eight forty-five-minute episodes on the 2022 edition will be released on the platform, with the aim of capitalizing on how Formula 1 has been able to do with Drive to survive.
Avoided threesome
Or else, the Tour is playing small. With this route, he is probably content with a mano to mano when he could have organized a threesome with the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, a young Belgian predator. The Tour is dripping with talent. Too ? Egan Bernal winner in 2019, Pogacar in 2020 and 2021, Vingegaard in 2022: is there a desire, in the imagined scenario, to stop this accumulation of characters? Only one time trial, between Passy and Combloux (Haute-Savoie), short (22 kilometers) and intense, is scheduled. An exercise that the 22-year-old prodigy adores, who like all precocious and very strong Belgians is compared to Eddy Merckx (a comparison that has probably never been so fair with the recent world champion, winner of the Tour of Spain in august). “We are going to look at the routes and in particular the profiles and the kilometers against the clock. When we have this data, we can decide which race we do. Not before”, affirmed Evenepoel on October 3. Then to add, very quickly after the announcement of the route of the Tour of Italy and its three time trials, that he had “made his decision”.
The Tour will end, unsurprisingly, on the Champs-Elysées (which will not be the case in 2024 with the Olympic Games) which women will have the good fortune to avoid. When the men arrive on July 23, the Tour will launch its second soap opera of the summer. In July, the ladies had returned to racing, starting in Paris, before heading east to the Super board of Belles filles, in the Vosges. They will leave this time from Clermont-Ferrand for 8 stages, will cross the walnut fields of the Périgord Noir and will climb, like the men three weeks before them, the Tourmalet. Territory of legend of men’s cycling and therefore, soon to be women’s.
