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TOUR DE FRANCE

MAP: What you need to know about the 2023 Tour de France

The Tour de France begins on Saturday, with riders facing a Spanish start and a climb up the highest volcano in France before the traditional race finish in Paris.

Published: 27 October 2022 13:35 CEST
Updated: 26 June 2023 09:55 CEST
MAP: What you need to know about the 2023 Tour de France
Photo by Thomas SAMSON / AFP

This year’s event will be held in its usual time slot, while next year’s will be held earlier and will finish in Nice, in order to accommodate the Paris 2024 Olympics. 

The 2023 race begins on Saturday, July 1st in Bilbao, Spain, and riders will cycle 3,404km before finishing on July 23rd with the traditional ending on the Champs-Elysée in Paris.

Riders will go from Bilbao to San-Sebastian before heading through the Basque country and crossing the Pyrenees into Bayonne.

From there the route moves through south-west France including Bordeaux before heading into the Massif Central, including a climb up Pûy de Dome, the highest volcano in the Auvergne region of France.

In total it includes five mountain ranges and 30 climbs – seven more than the 2022 event.

The women’s race – a 1,000km route starting from Clermont Ferrand in central France – runs from July 23rd to 30th.

In detail

The 3,404km route features eight mountain stages and four hilly stages with just one medium length individual time trial placed early in the final week.

The route however ignores almost all of western and northern France.

“Over five or six years it evens out and we eventually get everywhere,” race organiser Christian Prudhomme said.

The killer stage in the 21-day race appears to be stage 17 from Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc to Courchevel, doted with four peaks and ascending way above the tree line to 2,300m of altitude where the oxygen is thin.

That kind of mountain stage would appear tailor-made for 2019 champion Egan Bernal and would give him hope against the two men who have won the title since, Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard.

Gone is the day-20 individual time-trial that produced such drama in the last two editions.

Instead organisers this year placed a blockbuster mountain run on that 20th stage from Belfort to Le Markstein Fellering, with a devastating five mountains to climb on what is ostensibly the final day.

The women’s Tour de France route involves a 1,000km route starting from Clermont Ferrand and taking the riders through the south and an ascent of the Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees as its highlight.

Continuing efforts to enliven the racing, especially the early action, the 2023 men’s route is laced with terrain tempting the great one-day specialists to soak up some glory.

The forested hills around Bilbao on stage one are an open invitation for the one-day specialists to go all in for the coveted overall leader’s yellow jersey right from day one.

That should also force a first minor skirmish among the overall contenders.

A daredevil finale on the 20km descent to the chic coastal resort of San Sebastian is likely to provide a show on stage two.

Day three takes the action back to France where the 22 teams of eight riders each move into the Pyrenees on the first weekend with storied mountains the Tourmalet and Aspin bringing the overall contenders into the thick of the battle.

The race then heads towards the Massif Central where the giant volcano Pûy de Dome awaits before stints in the Jura, the Alps and finally the Vosges.

There are high-altitude finish lines at Cauterets-Cambasque, Puy de Dôme, Grand Colombier and Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc.

Tradition suggests the race will be won in the Alps, but can only be clinched on stage 20 in the Vosges where five mountains could deliver a late twist. The first ten days however offer an open invitation to the emerging ‘total cycling’ adepts in the peloton.

This 110th edition of the Tour de France will be broadcast in 190 countries.

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PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS

Olympic torch sets sail at start of its voyage to France

The Olympic flame set sail on Saturday on its voyage to France on board the Belem, the Torch Relay reaching its climax at the revolutionary Paris Games opening ceremony along the river Seine on July 26.

Published: 27 April 2024 13:33 CEST
Olympic torch sets sail at start of its voyage to France

“The feelings are so exceptional. It’s such an emotion for me”, Tony Estanguet, Paris Olympics chief organiser, told reporters before the departure of the ship from Piraeus.

He hailed the “great coincidence” how the Belem was launched just weeks after the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896.

“These games mean a lot. It’s been a centenary since the last time we organised the Olympic games in our country,” he added.

The 19th-century three-masted boat set sail on a calm sea but under cloudy skies.

It was accompanied off the port of Piraeus by the trireme Olympias of the Greek Navy and 25 sailing boats while dozens of people watched behind railings for security reasons.

“We came here so that the children understand that the Olympic ideal was born in Greece. I’m really moved,” Giorgos Kontopoulos, who watched the ship starting its voyage with his two children, told AFP.

On Sunday, the ship will pass from the Corinth Canal — a feat of 19th century engineering constructed with the contribution of French banks and engineers.

‘More responsible Games’ 

The Belem is set to reach Marseille — where a Greek colony was founded in around 600 BCE — on May 8.

Over 1,000 vessels will accompany its approach to the harbour, local officials have said.

French swimmer Florent Manaudou will be the first torch bearer in Marseille. His sister Laure was the second torch bearer in ancient Olympia, where the flame was lit on April 16.

Ten thousand torchbearers will then carry the flame across 64 French territories.

It will travel through more than 450 towns and cities, and dozens of tourist attractions during its 12,000-kilometre (7,500-mile) journey through mainland France and overseas French territories in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific.

It will then reach Paris and be the centre piece of the hugely imaginative and new approach to the Games opening ceremony.

Instead of the traditional approach of parading through the athletics stadium at the start of the Games, teams are set to sail down the Seine on a flotilla of boats in front of up to 500,000 spectators, including people watching from nearby buildings.

The torch harks back to the ancient Olympics when a sacred flame burned throughout the Games. The tradition was revived in 1936 for the Berlin Games.

Greece on Friday had handed over the Olympic flame of the 2024 Games, at a ceremony, to Estanguet.

Hellenic Olympic Committee chairman Spyros Capralos handed the torch to Estanguet at the Panathenaic Stadium, where the Olympics were held in 1896.

Estanguet said the goal for Paris was to organise “spectacular but also more responsible Games, which will contribute towards a more inclusive society.”

Organisers want to ensure “the biggest event in the world plays an accelerating role in addressing the crucial questions of our time,” said Estanguet, a member of France’s Athens 2004 Olympics team who won gold in the slalom canoe event.

A duo of French champions, Beijing 2022 ice dance gold medallist Gabriella Papadakis and former swimmer Beatrice Hess, one of the most successful Paralympians in history, carried the flame during the final relay leg into the Panathenaic Stadium.

Nana Mouskouri, the 89-year-old Greek singer with a worldwide following, sang the French and Greek anthems at the ceremony.

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