The 2025
Tour de France is on! This Tuesday morning the route of the upcoming Grand Boucle has been fully revealed and it features a route with an explosive start and a second half with plenty high mountain stages featuring the Mont Ventoux, a mountain time-trial and plenty other classics!
The race starts off with a flat stage in the Hauts-de-France region, the far northwest. It will be an unusually 'easy' first week to the race which should not feature any mountain stage but instead a set of flat and hilly stages that will suit the sprinters and provide more opportunities for the classics specialists to thrive - something which has not been on the map much over the past few years, as Grand Tours lean more and more into the climber-oriented stages early in the race. We have hilltop finishes at Boulogne-sur-Mer and Mur-de-Bretagne which are well known in the race, but also the Puy Sancy climb on the Massif Central to finish off the first week of racing.
Week 2 will only have five days of racing, short but with a lot of difficulties in the Pyrenees. We have the return of the mythical Mountain Time-Trial at the Tour de France which will be on stage 13 up the Col de Peyresourde and Peyragudes climbs. Stages 12 and 14 will have summit finishes in Hautacam and Superbagneres where some big differences should be created.
The final week of racing features the queen stages. On stage 16 we have the return of the mythical Mont Ventoux as the summit finish of the first stage of the final week. The race finally heads into the Alps for two high mountain stages which will features a finale in Courchevel after tackling the Col de la Loze on stage 18; whilst stage 19 will be another massive day in the mountains with a finale on La Plagne. An explosive hilly stage 20 is an interesting change for the Tour, which then ends in Paris once again after it's absence from the 2024 edition.
We will analyze the route's profiles and climbs more in-depth in upcoming articles.
Stage 1: Lille - Lille
Stage 2: Lauwin-Planque - Boulogne-sur-Mer
Stage 3: Valenciennes - Dunkerque
Stage 4: Amiens - Rouen
Stage 5 (ITT): Caen - Caen
Stage 6: Bayeux - Viré
Stage 7: Saint-Malo - Mur-de-Bretagne
Stage 8: Saint-M´´éen Le Grand - Laval
Stage 9: Chinon - Chateauroux
Stage 10: Ennezat - Mont Dore-Puy de Sancy
Stage 11: Touluse - Toulouse
Stage 12: Auch - Hautacam
Stage 13 (ITT): Loudenvielle - Peyragudes
Stage 14: Pau - Luchon-Superbagneres
Stage 15: Carcassonne - Montpellier
Stage 16: Montpellier - Mont Ventoux
Stage 17: Bolléne - Valence
Stage 18: Vif - Courchevel
Stage 19: Albertville - La Plagne
Stage 20: Nantua - Pontarlier
Stage 21: Mantes-la-Ville - Champs-Elysées
Back to this old formula.
So much for limiting transfers between stages and the carbon footprint (as Prudhomme said they would). The riders will spend quite some time in the bus!
In a more progressive world, I’d say that would be a good thing, in today’s, I wonder whether with the number of following fans moving around don’t outpolute the whole event itself.
Buses are already quite efficient, what really would help is if they’d stop using exhaust pipe cars during the race (am sure riders would appreciate too, especially in the mountains where you can really smell car emissions).
Personally, I only go when the route passes within a cycling tour of a few days’ distance.
yeah, mikebeast, hoping the same about MVDP. saw that the day BEFORE they announced the route he was talking about skipping the Tour to race MTB. hopefully he started to change his mind almost immediately, because Week 1 has van der poel written all over it.
I'm sure Jonas will be salivating at the prospect of the stage 13 mountain ITT.
I'm glad there are no major mountains in the first week. Hopefully we'll see some one day specialists and puncheurs vying for yellow before the main GC guys take centre stage. Perhaps MVDP will be more prominent as a result.
Ooohhh, this is going to be great!
yeah, looks like a really great route they put together. can’t please everybody, but this looks like a GOOD ONE.