That’s good news for cyclists that sometime in the last few million years, plate tectonics and volcanism stopped giving France new elevations. Who knows what meanness the makers of the Tour de France would have been capable of when planning the next route if there were a few other mountain ranges in the Grande Nation.
All power to the mountains, that is the motto for the edition in summer 2023. The peloton has to struggle through all five mountain ranges in the country. Eight high mountain stages are planned, with the return to the Puy de Dome volcano after three and a half decades of abstinence and a queen stage through the Vosges on the penultimate day as highlights. There are only six flat stages and only 22 time trial kilometers – and thus fewer than ever since the discipline was introduced in 1934.
“Very nice”, says Tadej Pogacar, the overall winner of 2020 and 2021, who can now fight eternal battles with this year’s triumphant Jonas Vingegaard and other experts for the high mountains. But that’s not really nice, at least for the neutral observer.
The track design aims for more and more spectacle and difficulty
It’s been a couple of years since the tour has changed. Even in the doping-soaked nineties and noughties, the standard program of the three-week loop included many quiet flat stages, on which little spectacular happened apart from a sprint to the finish line. There is now action on almost every section. This is due to the way the peloton rides, but it is also due to the design of the track, which is always looking for more spectacle.
This seems strange, not only in view of the justified long-term skepticism in the scene: the supposedly clean heroes of today sometimes climb the climbs faster than the takers of back then, and with less rest in between. At the same time, such a track layout is not appropriate for many professionals. The sprinters have been neglected at the Tour de France for years. With only six flat stages, everyone thinks twice about participating. Or rather, every team leader ponders how much sense it makes to take a sprinter of classic design into the squad if it has a real chance of victory in a few days – and the battle in the mountains demands all your strength.
The Tour de France has always lived from being an event in which all specialists come into their own: the climbers as well as the time trialists, the pedalers as well as the sprinters. If you focus too much on the spectacle in the mountains, the loop destroys its own work of art.
