OK, now I've had the chance to take a proper look at things, let's see what we make of it.
Stage 1: OK in a vacuum. At least it's not the increasingly-common-in-recent-years "stage 1 being a complete flat sprint to ensure that some big name sprinter can get the jersey, who has no intention of even trying to defend it but is a big name so it's apparently ok" stage. Now for the bad news: the stage is run in the wrong direction. As a result they're doing the easier side of the climbs and putting them further from the finish, by doing the shorter loop first and the longer one second. No idea why. Now, this stage resembles one of those Tour of California stages that Sagan loves - the ones which have far too much climbing for most pure sprinters, but none of the climbing is close enough to the finish to make anything but a reduced bunch sprint likely, and he is usually the best sprinter left in the bunch in such an eventuality. Maybe they decided the maillot vert wasn't dead enough, and after taking it to Paris from stage 2 in 2012, stage 3 in 2013, stage 2 in 2014, stage 2 in 2018 and stage 3 in 2019, they want to see if they can get him to go coast to coast.
Stage 2: the counterpoint to that - a stage which, unless it is completely soft-pedalled to a level completely disgusting even by Tour de France péloton standards, should create some genuine time gaps - and more than the most interesting opening weekend stages of recent years, namely Plumelec 2008, Spa 2010 and Sheffield 2014. It's nice that we have something that will genuinely sort the contenders from the pretenders this early, and will set the status quo for the race to come, hopefully resulting in a less nervy péloton and fewer week 1 crashes as fewer riders have anything to protect. The big climbs are far enough from the finish that it isn't going to kill off anybody who wouldn't have been killed off anyway, but nevertheless, you can't just peak for week 3 and be done with it next year, so that is a big step forward.
Stage 3: from the rumoured profile, another Sagan special, if the pace is high, but between stages 2 and 4, probably going to be raced slower so the main sprinters will get to contest it. The most important and best thing about it? Praise be to hosannah: the potentially interesting stages are on weekends, and the boring stage of the first three is on a Monday! Giro, are you taking note?
Stage 4: pretty tame stage to Orcières-Merlette. Not too difficult a climb - should realistically only be cat.2 unless they're categorizing all the way - but enough to sort the contenders out. Probably a sprint of the elites at the top. I have mixed feelings - this is precisely the kind of early GC shakedown that I would ordinarily call for, and this is a good climb for that purpose, à la Montevergine di Mercogliano, and it's also kinda nice to see it back after a 30 year absence, but with stages 2 and 6 also in week 1, it seems a bit unnecessary, a bit like Macugnaga in the 2011 Giro.
Stage 5: looks to be a - catchphrase time - "worthless flat stage".
Stage 6: Col de la Lusette - Mont Aigoual combo has been a traceur favourite for years, and it's great to see it - some genuine tough mountains being used outside of the two main ranges is a real rarity (depending on your opinion of classing Mont Ventoux as Massif Central, of course). Would love to see this finish in a Paris-Nice, to be honest. Pretty gutted that the plan appears to be Lusette off a complete cold open, but nevertheless, Lusette hasn't been seen since the heyday of the Midi Libre, so again - nice to see it resurrected and not just the same old same old. If they're going to start to pay more frequently for stages in the Cévennes, this can only be a good thing as you could have some genuine, real medium mountain terrain of the kind the Tour hasn't done recently, or some interesting stages in the Ardêche. It's been way too long since we've seen things like the Col de l'Œillon, and climbs like the Col de la Mûre were good for some action in Paris-Nice. Pré de la Dame is a nice climb too, and places like Finiels, Baracuchet, Malpertus, Croix de Bauzon and so on.
Stage 7: standard transitional stage.
Stage 8: at least they improved it by putting Menté in. This just reeks of 2016. It could be the best stage of the entire race, or it could be the biggest phony war of the entire race. However, it's also the least interesting mountain stage of the lot, given that we've seen a LOT of these key climbs. Peyresourde is just about the most common climb in the entire race, while Balès might be pretty new (introduced 2006), we haven't half seen a lot of it in that time. 5 times in Le Tour, once in La Vuelta, and I think 7 times in the Route du Sud.
Stage 9: This is actually a potentially really interesting medium mountain stage. I mean, although they are using Issarbe, it isn't super innovative, using Marie-Blanque as the main focus, but with a rest day coming there could be some good action on Marie-Blanque. There won't be any earlier.
Stage 10: The classic echelon-bait. Hopefully the weather plays ball, if not then it's a worthless flat stage.
Stage 11: Two straight flat stages after the rest day - got to hope the weather plays ball in stage 10, cos this one looks far less promising.
Stage 12: It'd be nice to see how close that steep ramp is to the finish on the scale to see if this is potentially going to create action. It looks ok, time will tell if that run-in is one that's suited to the genuine puncheurs or if it's good for sprinters à la Stirling or similar. It looks from the speculative profile to be one for the Sagan/Matthews/Bennett type of riders. The Corrèze département does offer some interesting options, and while this isn't the best that they could do with it, it's decent.
Stage 13: marketed as an MTF. It's actually more of a puncheur finish, it seems. Would be a good Paris-Nice stage, it's a nice lead in to a mountain weekend for a GT, as it's steep enough that it should create some small gaps - however this is after we've already had a number of mountain stages, so it's a bit less valuable. Also, the weekend coming up is not exactly a Zoncolan / Val di Fassa pairing, so Idunno. Again - nice to see some Massif Central finishes that aren't just at Mende.
Stage 14: this is some absolute BS here. Horrible stuff. Typical damn ASO - a stage with about 10 mountain stages, and they still put a flat stage on the penultimate weekend. "Oh, but Libertine, it has the Col de Béal in it! It's not a flat stage!" No, you might be right. It's something that is, if anything, worse: one of those Tour of California stages that, if raced hard, gets rid of the most limited sprinters, but inevitably goes to a Sagan type, and if not raced hard, completely neutralises the mountains and lets everybody come back. It harks back to Tarbes in the 2009 Tour, and you know, it is part of the "introducing cols the Tour has never seen before" that ASO are hyping - only for said col to be completely wasted. Hopefully the run-in is pretty interesting, rather than just interminable false flat; the speculative profile suggests that the run-in is the Côte de la Croix-Rousse, which absolutely isn't anything to get interested in - the Dauphiné even had a stage finish atop said côte in 2011, which was won by that noted puncheur... John Degenkolb.
Stage 15: Actually pretty happy about this, a nice run-in with Fromentel from the brutal Artemare side of the climb before Biche and then the final climb. Would probably prefer they chained it together with the climb from Anglefort, but assume that Culoz is paying so it's got to be the Culoz side from the old days of the Tour de l'Ain. This should be, for my money, the big MTF of the race. The big problem is that the fact the race goes MTF crazy in the second half is likely to neuter racing in the Pyrenées, which are comparatively tame, as a result. With a rest day following, this could be pretty good for action.
Stage 16: This is where it unravels a bit. Like stage 2, in a vacuum, this is a great stage. It looks a bit like the Pescocostanzo stage of the 2008 Giro, and is placed deep into the race where people will need to make it count. In actuality though, with the two main mountain stages to follow, I see this as being follow-the-leader all the way up Montée Saint-Nizier and then a few seconds being gained or lost at Côte 2000.
Stage 17: While the stage may generate action ahead of the final climb, I anticipate with a multi-col stage the following day that this is unlikely and so it will come down to the last 5km of the Col de la Loze. The only alternative would have been to beef up the first part with the addition of Croix de Fer via Glandon, or Chaussy perhaps, before the new side of Madeleine. Again, it's more just a shame that it's a bit of a waste of unveiling a new side of the Madeleine, which is my favourite of the Tour's beloved central Alpine over-used ascents. I like Mottaret more than Les Allues or other Méribel options.
Stage 18: I actually like Plateau des Glières from this side, and I quite like this stage in a vacuum, but I do think that here we perhaps needed more of a medium mountain stage to help with the balance? I'd probably have preferred them make this one easier, and instead head direct to Albertville, do Forclaz from Queige, then either Aravis or Croix-Fry and then the same run-in. Orange-Montisel might have made for a fantastic finish here actually, just above the Col des Fleuries so it would have been about 7km at 4,5% to finish for a mini-Aprica type role, and try to mimic a stage like the 2015 Vuelta Cercedilla one.
Stage 19: Probably going to be a worthless flat stage, or one where the break gets 20 minutes up the road.
Stage 20: The only ITT of the race. Now, I know that I actually did something very similar to this in one of my Race Design Thread Tours
here but that race also included a 50km flat ITT near the end. Putting a bona fide cat.1 climb into an ITT isn't in and of itself bad, especially if it's an MTT, but if it's the ONLY ITT of the race, then it's not just bad, it's flat out atrocious. Add in the fact that the climb in question is the overused, overhyped and completely saturated Planche des Belles Filles and we have an absolute steaming turd of a stage that almost single-handedly destroys the entire race's rating and appears to be on a quest to make me give it minus ten stars. You know I said above about how Port de Balès had been overused since its introduction? Planche des Belles Filles says "hold my bière". Planche des Belles Filles was introduced in 2012, and is in a region which doesn't have its own pro level race, unlike Balès, and has still managed to appear 5 times in the Tour de France (this will be its 6th appearance in 9 years, that's Vuelta-in-the-80s level bad!), 3 times (consecutive years) in the Tour d'Alsace, and twice in the Route de France Féminin - and I can guarantee you that had that race not gone under when La Course trampled all over it, removing a week-long race from the women's calendar and replacing it with
another crappy pseudo-crit that means it's difficult for the women to actually showcase any of the interesting racing they're capable of, it would have been seen more. I hate Planche des Belles Filles at this point and never want to see it again, or at least not for a minimum of five years.
Stage 21: This is the typical parade, you won't do anything about this, but I do, however, want to throw some shade on ASO for their returning of La Course to a one-day race on the Champs. This, to me, is the final nail in the coffin for the organisation that tells me once and for all, without a shadow of a doubt, their entire intention with La Course right now is to sabotage women's racing to stop people from clamouring for a women's Tour that might mean they have to put some effort and work into promoting women's cycling. I think that ever since Pauline Ferrand-Prévot started collecting injuries the way other people collect baseball cards, and started focusing her career more on MTB than the road, ASO have lost interest, and clearly their interest only stemmed from the fact there was a popular, marketable and successful French talent out there, and died when her road results started to suffer. They ditched the mountain one-day race this year in favour of a circuit race on the ITT circuit that meant that rather than go through an hour or two before the men, the women had to set off some seven hours before the leading men, because you had a good four hours' worth of men setting off on the ITT after the women had already packed their bags and gone home, then used this as an excuse to put forward the argument that the women did not attract the same level of audience as previously and ditch them back to the original, and laziest of all, of their token attempts to not get their WWT status revoked, which it should be. When the organisers of the biggest race in the world are claiming that they aren't capable of producing more than an hour-long crit on a pan-flat city centre circuit of 6km for the women, it's because they simply aren't trying. It diverts precious funds from keeping their catastrophic loss-making pet project, the Dakar Rally, afloat. Between this, Madrid Challenge, RideLondon (which actually hasn't got WWT status for 2020, but should still be able to retain a strong péloton thanks to its impressive prize pot), it's an absolute travesty and a real disgrace that the women's races that get the most broadcasting are the ones
which have been actively designed with the intention of preventing any interesting racing.
...
So, my overall impressions? Well, a lot of stages that are good in a vacuum. Lots to look forward to and even have some enthusiasm for. Lots of long-forgotten climbs and new innovations including some bound to cheer many traceurs who have been waiting for those in ages. At the same time, some of those innovations (Issarbe-Soudet, Béal) have been introduced in places that are inevitably going to blunt their impact, and the pacing of the Alps are such that it is likely to neuter one of the most interesting on-paper stages, the Villard-de-Lans one. It seems to me that with stage 2 being so tough, one of the two week 1 mountaintops is superfluous - somehow managing 7 uphill finishes while simultaneously offering nothing in the Pyrenées just feels weird. I should be more enthused than I am.
And the main reason for that is the awful lack of balance. There are no cobbles, no ribin, no Mont Cassel or stages through Normandie and Brétagne, the type of thing that says we have some tough rouleur stages here that can compensate the lack of ITT mileage. Unless the wind blows an absolute hurricane on stage 10, it's likely that we are hoping for 28 not-totally-flat kilometres in the Vosges to counter the sum total of the gaps that can be generated by the Col des Quatre Chemins, Orcières-Merlette, the Col de la Lusette/Mont Aigoual double, the Col de Peyresourde, Col de Marie-Blanque, Puy Mary by its steepest side, the Col du Grand Colombier, Saint-Nizier and Villard-de-Lans, the Col de la Loze, Plateau des Glières and the Planche des Belles Filles. If 28km of ITT is sufficient to counterbalance the gaps that can be generated on those mountains
combined, then cycling is dead as a competitive sport. Nobody in any GC-minded team need bring any rouleur domestiques or anybody who isn't going to be expended on the mountain train, because the flat stages will inevitably be controlled by the sprinters' teams because they'll need to make something up somewhere. Unless they're trying to break Sagan's stranglehold on the maillot vert by making it so that Alaphilippe can win it, I'm not sure about what the function of all those "flat stages" which have bigger obstacles used in pointlessly non-decisive parts of the stages is.
Summary:
Positive points:
not one shingle-inducing sub-120km mountain stage. Not many super-long stages, but an edition without the over-reliance on the gimmick short stage following 2011 (which was very successful, yes, but they didn't watch the
better mountain stage the previous day and think "200km mountain stages are great", did they?).
some strong stage designs - 2, 9, 15, 16, and 18 are all really good-looking potential stages in a vacuum, and depending on the run-in, possibly 12 as well.
some actual innovation from ASO - Lusette-Aigoual in particular, and the Grand Colombier stage using the Artemare side fills me with optimism for the future as well.
more decisive week 1 stages than we've seen in half a decade, with no build up of back to back featureless flat stages inevitably marred by crashes.
better than usual use of the Massif Central.
No TTT
Negative points:
Only one ITT, and that has a mountain in it.
That ITT is less than 40km long.
That mountain is the Planche des Belles Filles.
No rouleur stages, other than potentially stage 10, that suggest they will present any challenge that disadvantages the featherweights, meaning we will likely see full climbing domestique corps, carrying the leaders up the majority of the climbs.
La Course. Like, literally everything about it. ASO can go to hell for this one.
Stage 8 is like ASO designing a Pyrenean stage in their sleep.
The concentration of the hardest mountain stages at the end of the race - with the toughest MTFs on stages 15 and 17 - runs the risk of riders trying to sleepwalk through the earlier stages to base the whole race on the final week despite ASO's best intentions. Especially with the TT held off until stage 20, this may mean that the gaps not having been generated yet means there's a 2012 Giro style inertia.
Ultimately, those who argue that 2012 was a necessary gamble, trying to test the waters on a more TT-heavy route than was in vogue at the time, should look at this route in a similar fashion - while 2012 was overbalanced in favour of the time triallist, this one is clearly overbalanced in favour of the grimpeur. Personally I thought that 2012 was a route designed clearly around ASO wanting Wiggins to win, and this design is clearly with the intention of trying not to have a race dominated by diesel trains. If it was an experiment with the intention of providing a good race, then 2012 failed. This may be similar, but at least ASO are trying something. I just don't know if, looking at the marginalization of the TT, it's necessarily something that will work, or even if it will be that good if it does work. However, I'm just too annoyed by La Course to give it a mark out of 10 and nail my colours to the mast. Objectivity is hard to maintain.
www.geoportail.gouv.fr
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram