After greater than half one million folks flocked to the streets of Paris to look at the Olympic street race in July, the ultimate stage of the 2025 Tour de France may embody the route’s spotlight climb up Montmartre Hill to boost the usually processional circuit race.
2025 marks 50 years for the reason that iconic Champs Elysées first hosted the ultimate stage of the Tour. The 2024 Tour completed in Nice because of preparations for the Paris Olympics however Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), which runs the Tour, is hoping to return to Paris with the legacy of the 2024 video games working by the ultimate stage.
According to a report in Le Parisien, a file has been submitted to the Paris Police Prefecture by ASO to permit the peloton to go over Montmartre Hill and as much as Sacre Cœur 3 times through the ultimate stage. The iconic climb is the place Mathieu van der Poel lit up the racing and a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals watch the racing.
The intention would nonetheless be to complete on France’s most well-known avenue however with out all the laps that take within the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde and the Louvre.
Ever since Greg LeMond’s dramatic ultimate day time trial win and last-minute snatch of the yellow jersey in 1989, the Tour’s ultimate stage has come to be a day for the yellow jersey to have a good time arm-in-arm along with his teammates earlier than the sprinters battle it out on the Champs-Elysées.
After the joy of the Paris Olympic video games and the unimaginable ambiance introduced by such a big fan turnout, the thought of the Butte Montmartre characterising the Tour was shortly dominated out by the Tour’s technical director Thierry Gouvenou who mentioned “It would not be acceptable.”
The largest barrier to this concept materialising is the logistical nightmare it will produce for the organisers, with the Tour’s most peloton measurement of 176 being considerably bigger than that of the 90 riders who raced on the Olympics.
That quantity was additionally vastly smaller as soon as they hit Montmartre Hill, because the smaller nations shortly dropped behind the highest nations. Rue Lepic can be a really slim cobbled street, making it very tough for automobiles to comply with and unimaginable for a convoy of workforce vehicles to make it by, that means a mechanical may very well be catastrophic.
“The Tour de France peloton is twice as large because it was on the Olympics, so we might have to search out a lot larger streets than these used to map out a brand new circuit,” Gouvenou instructed L’Équipe in August.
“Towards Montmartre, they went by some very slim locations, actual bottlenecks. In some locations, in the event that they wanted to offer mechanical service to riders in the back of the bunch, they’d barely have been capable of open the automobile doorways. It labored yesterday right here, however it would not be acceptable through the Tour.”
After the joy of the Paris Oympic video games and the unimaginable ambiance introduced by such a big fan turnout, the thought of the Butte Montmartre characterising the Tour was shortly dominated out by the Tour’s technical director d Montmartre, making it possible this concept stays a dream for ASO.
