Tour de France ‘comes home’ as 2025 route unveiled
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Tour de France general director Christian Prudhomme and director of the Tour de France Femmes, Marion Rousse present the map of Tour de France Femmes.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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PARIS – The 2025 Tour de France will be raced exclusively in France for the first time since the 2020 Covid-19 edition, with the 21 stages including two time trials, a blockbuster final week in the Alps and a return to the finale on the Champs-Elysees.
After successive starts outside France, in Copenhagen in 2022, Bilbao in 2023 and Florence in 2024, the 2025 Grand Depart is in the northern French city of Lille.
“We decided to bring the Tour home, it was high time after all the foreign starts,” race director Christian Prudhomme said.
After the 2024 route had bypassed Paris due to the Olympics, the 2025 edition has eight stages in the north and west and ends with eight laps along the cobbles of the Champs-Elysees.
The Olympics enjoyed a huge success with a long, arduous road race around Paris but the organisers said it was too soon for the Tour to attempt that.
“We are in talks with the City Hall and the police about the possibility of doing that some time,” Prudhomme added.
A fierce struggle for the first yellow jersey accorded to the overall race leader will be decided on a 185km race around Lille.
Fans from across the border in Belgium can support a potential winner in double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who finished third in 2024.
“Evenepoel proved this year he is also a man of the Tour and we expect him to be active next year too,” Prudhomme said.
The three-week extravaganza visits the northern ports of Dunkirk and Boulogne before heading to Caen, where a time trial will pay homage to those who fell in the 1944 Battle of Normandy which largely destroyed the city.
The race also makes a rare visit to Brittany.
“France is a big country and the Tour doesn’t always get to Brittany but next year both of the Tours de France, men’s and women’s, have major stages there,” said the Brittany-born David Lappartient, head of the International Cycling Union and candidate for the International Olympic Committee presidency.
Stage 7, which starts in Saint Malo, ends on the short steep climb on the Mur-de-Bretagne where in 2021 Mathieu van der Poel, the grandson of Raymond Poulidor – eight times on the podium but never an overall winner – recorded his first stage victory.
Wine lovers will spot Chinon on Stage 10, and the Rhone Valley on Stage 17, but there is no Burgundy, Bordeaux or Champagne on the map at all.
Tradition holds that the Tour de France is won and lost in the Alps and the next edition has been stacked with mountains in the third week.
The first mountains come as late as Stage 10 in the Massif Central on July 14, France’s national holiday.
A day off in Toulouse is followed by three blockbuster climb stages in the Pyrenees, then three more in the last week in the Alps with a plethora of legendary Tour mountains on the menu.
Defending champion Tadej Pogacar will again start as favourite alongside two-time winner Jonas Vingegaard, with Evenepoel snapping at their heels. AFP
