"It wouldn't be acceptable during the Tour" - Incredible Paris Olympic circuit impossible to replicate for Tour de France says Thierry Gouvenou

The road races at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games were an incredible spectacle. Thrilling racing, epic performances and drama fight until the last, the course was a real success with both the audience and experts, with some calling for a replication of the route as a stage of the Tour de France in future.

Sadly though, according to the Tour de France’s technical director Thierry Gouvenou at least, such a stage, whilst an exciting idea on paper, would be a logistical nightmare in fruition, making it near enough impossible to bring to reality. 

“The Tour de France peloton is twice as big as it was at the Olympics, so we'd have to find much bigger streets than those used at the weekend to map out a new circuit," Gouvenou explains in conversation with French outlet L’Équipe. “Towards Montmartre, they went through some very narrow places, real bottlenecks. In some places, if they needed to provide mechanical service to riders at the back of the bunch, they’d barely have been able to open the car doors. It worked yesterday here, but it wouldn't be acceptable during the Tour.”  

Another fact to note is that whilst the iconic roads of the French capital are intertwined in Tour de France folklore, the fact is that they aren't great roads to ride on, with the number of mechanical issues incredibly high over the Olympic races. “That didn't surprise me. Every year we have more mechanical problems during the 60km we cover in Paris than on the rest of the Tour de France," Gouvenou reflects. “And it would have been even worse if the weather hadn't been good: the slightest drop of water turns the streets of Paris into an ice rink, as we saw in the time trial.”

“You would need very strong political will to put all that in place,” Gouvenou concludes. “When we do the Champs-Élysées circuit, we barely encircle any residents, apart from the unknown soldier. If we went to Montmartre, that would have an enormous impact on the inhabitants."