2023 Tour de France route rumors

[fbjim]

I also will say that I like the prospective parcours for the alpine stages. More climbing near the start, less of the formula of "HC grinder, descent, HC MTF" that had gotten old, as wonderful a stage as Galibier/Granon was.

 

[tobydawq]

Yesterday I thought it could still be anywhere between a 4 and an 8 depending on what runors would pan out

They went for a bona fide 1. ASO is hopeless, anything good is by accident.

Today is a glorious day for the PWU. We are open to all applications

 

[zlev11]

this route is sickeningly bad. what a way to squander having two evenly matched contenders for the first time in like 40 years.

 

[Ricco']

The best tours of the last 10 year were 2015 and 2019 and they had little ITT km.

I didn't paid much attention to the 2015 Tour so I'm not going to speak about that one but we could say that one of the biggest reasons the 2019 Tour was great was because of the time trial, because without Alaphilippe's performance there the race would lose some of the interest in the forthcoming days.

 

[QueenStagiaire]

Maybe Guillen designed this route. Although he would use even less climbs the rest is pretty Vuelta-esque.

 

[Ilmaestro99]

Yesterday I thought it could still be anywhere between a 4 and an 8 depending on what runors would pan out

They went for a bona fide 1. ASO is hopeless, anything good is by accident.

Today is a glorious day for the PWU. We are open to all applications

Tom Dumolin has retired mate

 

[gavia88]

first attempt to show what would have been better:

• STAGE 107/01 182 KM BILBAO > BILBAO ✅ really great stage to start with, we can expect some GC action on the last steep wall
• STAGE 207/02 209 KM VITORIA-GASTEIZ > SAINT-SÉBASTIEN ✅ ok, stage, less difficult than the day before. But quite some people (not the main contenders) close in GC that will try to get yellow.
• STAGE 307/03 185 KM AMOREBIETA-ETXANO > BAYONNE ✅ a flat stage at this point is ok
• STAGE 407/04 182 KM DAX > NOGARO ❌ probably against the general opinion on the forum, but I would have liked a TTT of about 25-35 kilometers
• STAGE 507/05 165 KM PAU > LARUNS ✅ okish, don't like the fact it's just a copy past from a stage 2 years ago
• STAGE 607/06 145 KM TARBES > CAUTERETS-CAMBASQUE ✅ okish, at least some GC action on Cambasque. Not a great stage design and again Aspin - Tourmalet. So, I'm not hyped for this stage neither. But at this point in the race acceptable.
• STAGE 707/07 170 KM MONT-DE-MARSAN > BORDEAUX ✅ considering the changes above, only the 2nd flat stage. That is ok at this point.
• STAGE 807/08 201 KM LIBOURNE > LIMOGES ✅ has the potential to be something simular as the Longwy stage last year. Looks very hilly in the final (more details about those hills for a definitive conclusion)
• STAGE 907/09 184 KM SAINT-LÉONARD-DE-NOBLAT > PUY DE DÔME ✅ At this spot in the race it is a perfect stage as the first really super hard test. And great to see Puy the dome back in the tour.
• REST07/10 CLERMONT-FERRAND
• STAGE 1007/11 167 KM VULCANIA > ISSOIRE ❌ what I see now, the route is very hilly, but the final 60 k are rubbish for GC action, so it's the typical transitional stage from which you know before the start it's not suitable for GC action, but to hard for a sprint. 100% breakaway. Not my favorite kind of stage if you know that already up front. I would make this the principle TT. 45 k between Vulcania and Issoire. You don't even have to switch cities.
• STAGE 1107/12 180 KM CLERMONT-FERRAND > MOULINS ✅ only the '3rd' flat stage, in my scheme
• STAGE 1207/13 ROANNE > BELLEVILLE-EN-BEAUJOLAIS ❌ how could the miss Mont Brioully? Add Mont Brioully and the stage looks great. Normally for the breakaway, but current rout + Mont Brioully could be ambush as well.
• STAGE 1307/14 138 KM CHÂTILLON-SUR-CHALARONNE > GRAND COLOMBIER ➖ a bit neutral here. I don't like the stage. But it's relatively early in the race. So, it would fit as the last real HC finish. A GC from Vireau - Biche - GC for 2nd time from Vireau would have been better. But I can live with current design if other stage in the Alps would have been designet better.
• STAGE 1407/15 152 KM ANNEMASSE > MORZINE LES PORTES DU SOLEIL ❌ After a hard HC GC finish it would be the perfect place for the queen stage. Saleve, Ramaz, Joux-Plaine, Joux-Vert and les Gets finish. They always use Joux-Plaine the same way, while a perfect linking super hard - less hard mountain combi with it is possible. The start with Saleve from the steep side could lead to more surprises at the start, people starting with sore legs after the HC finish the day before.
• STAGE 1507/16 180 KM LES GETS LES PORTES DU SOLEIL > SAINT-GERVAIS MONT BLANC ❌I would remove les Bettex completely. Make the Morzine stage more important and make this a less dificult stage, something like Rome-Colombier, Aravis and then 2 or 3 times a circuit with Dormancy and Amerands. It would have been classified as medium mountain, but Dormancy and Amerands are that steep that some suprising GC action would have been possible.
• REST07/17 SAINT-GERVAIS MONT BLANC
• STAGE 1607/18 22 KM PASSY > COMBLOUX ❌ afwul as the only TT in the race. So TTT and flat ITT are added earlier to the race and this TT could be modified to a full MTT. PASSY - LES BETTEX
• STAGE 1707/19 166 KM SAINT-GERVAIS MONT BLANC > COURCHEVEL ❌ really hard stage, but the design is so bad. Courchevel finish is dificult to fix, but 2 suggestions to make it better: 1) Saisies, valley, 1x Loze, 2xLoze, final ramp airport Courchevel or 2) Saisies, Roseland, Loze, Meribel finish. This tour needs places to attack from far, they are completely missing.
• STAGE 1807/20 186 KM MOÛTIERS > BOURG-EN-BRESSE ➖ well, I have no clue without details, but it's classified as hilly. But I would probably switch this one to a complete flat stage as we had already several days with GC importancy in a row. So someting like, Valley, 1 climb to go to the rhone valley and flat last 100k. Maybe there is even some wind in the Rhone valley.
• STAGE 1907/21 173 KM MOIRANS-EN-MONTAGNE > POLIGNY ❌ after a flat stage the day before, this could be changed to a medium mountain, around Poligny there are some hills. They could finish uphill. Not a super hard stage, but some fights uphill between GC, before the final test in the Vosgues.
• STAGE 2007/22 133 KM BELFORT > LE MARKSTEIN FELLERING ✅ First of all, I really like the fact, that a decisive stage is not an Alp, pyrenees or TT. Desing is okish, mostly because of the Petit-Ballon + Platzerwasel combi, but I would have prefered to add Hundsruck and col du Haag between (2/3) ballon d'Asace and the hills near Gerardmer.
• STAGE 2107/23 115 KM SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES > PARIS CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES ✅ 5th predictable sprint is reasonable.

 

[SHAD0W93]

Excluding a Vuelta where he lost to Mäder and a couple of races where his back plagued him (Tirreno 2021,

The same Vuelta he had the long range attack in and if he was following Mas and Yates MAL would have been on the podium? Considering the circumstances he had a great Vuelta that with better luck would have been better.

 

[fbjim]

I think it's better than the somewhat similarly "odd" 2020 route but that's not the highest bar of a route to clear. Use of mountains in the early stages is much better, and the alpine stages are quite a bit better as well - there's no "what is the point of this stage" moments like Villard-de-Lans or La-Roche-sur-Foron.

I still think it's going to run into trouble for the same reason that 2020 did where everyone will be crammed at the top of GC and nobody will want to take big risks when losing 90 seconds drops you from 3rd to 8th.

 

[18-Valve. (pithy)]

I doubt that the tour suits Vingegaard. He is the guy for the long and high climbs, not those zig zag 30 minute climbs. Only the stage over the Col de la Loze really suits him. I mean he definitely can win it, but he needs Pogacar to have a bad day on his favourite terrain

I'm not sure if Vingegaard has to rely on Pog having a bad day. I think his likely superior recovery could give him the edge on this course.

stages 13 through 17 are pretty hard by recent TDF standards.

stage 13 Unipuerto MTF
stage 14: almost 4,300 m elevation gain
stage 15: 4,700 m +

stage 17: 5,400 m +


The stage 16 ITT is underrated, I think. Great design and pretty hard despite its distance.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Why does people suddenly love ITTs??

Nobody wants to win the Tour like Wiggens , nobody wants to be Mick Rogers or Tony Martin.

People like Remco because of the way he won Liege, not because he win a Vuelta ITT in extremadura or Alicante or somewhere

The best tours of the last 10 year were 2015 and 2019 and they had little ITT km.

Put 80km of TT and Vingeggad or Pogacar or Evenpoel or whoever puts 4 mins without thinking and makes the other stages obsolete. Might as well just do a zwift race with who has the best numbers, then combine that in a formula with the team budget and we have the le Tour de france winner for all the forum members here. Le Tour de Zwift

Its good to have riders racing on the road , making decisions, climbing, descending, sprinting, crosswinds etc. ITT don't make a good race.

The only annoying part of this is Remco will do the Giro which means our Fausto will lose another opportunity to lead the team. On the other hand, Landa will be in contention for a podium at the Tour.

And if there are no time gaps that put the better climbers at a disadvantage, then they don't race on the road because they can do it in smaller, energy-saving bursts. We can point at the positive race in the 2022 Tour, but just the same you have the 2020 Tour, with Jumbo trying to win in time gains from uphill sprints exclusively before losing the title in the only ITT at the end of the race, or the 2012 Giro where everybody was so close on time that surely it was a super exciting race... except it wasn't, it was an absolute heap of mediocrity with everybody riding in formation on every mountain stages and then Purito attacking to gain five seconds at 250m to go (hyperbole).

Time gaps that put some capable GC riders at a disadvantage are crucial to incentivising action. I know that at the moment many of the best climbers ARE also the best TTers, but while the Wiggins tour is reductio ad absurdum (although he was the 2nd best climber in that race anyway), it's not like there weren't strong TTers contending for the podium when Contador, Evans or Menchov were around. The likes of Carapaz, Bernal, Quintana, López, they should be having to make speculative moves and desperation assaults to try to compete with the more rounded riders. That's how the pure climber has historically contended GCs, the Lucien van Impes, the Federico Bahamontes, the Lucho Herreras, the José Manuel Fuentes, the Claudio Chiappuccis, the Marco Pantanis. Hell, back in the day a fast pace on a flat stage and the best climbers would be turfed out the back in a way that's just not possible today with the increased professionalism and depth in the péloton. That's why they're beloved and there is so much romance in the sport attached to the wispy pure escalador. If they aren't disadvantaged by the TT mileage, then they don't have to attack from deep and the race is duller. The 2022 Tour had big gaps, and that was what made it good, because Pogačar couldn't just overhaul his deficit in ten second chunks in the last kilometre over and over, nor could he just sit in and wait for a TT where he was inevitably going to win like, say, Dumoulin's Giro win where the onus was on Quintana to extend his lead, not Dumoulin to attack it. The other issue is that with limited challenge against the clock, MTF-heavy mountain stages where the earlier climbs are likely to be soft-pedalled or tough flat stages to control, a team can just produce a super-powered mountain train and result in more domestiques being available when they hit the final climbs and less time spent with the leaders working mano a mano.

The ITT is not the only means to force these gaps, but it is the easiest and most obvious way to guarantee them - there are lots of other ways via rouleur challenges, and stages that force teams to balance out the selection, but sometimes those are dependent on location hosts (the cobbles of the north, the ribinou of Brétagne, for example) or the weather (crosswind stages). If ASO unveil their flat stages and there are a number of such challenges - ramps and repechos that will force gaps, crosswind-baiting stretches, dirt roads, bergs and similar that mean that we can expect sizable gaps from flat stages other than from an ITT, then it may not be a problem at all. Just look at the 2010 Giro, a much-loved race, but that only had 37km of ITT, 13 of which was a cat.1 mountain. However, alongside that it had 32km of TTT that forced more balanced selections (and in which Scarponi lost more time than in the rest of the race put together thanks to being pegged to Jackson Rodríguez' pace, an example I've often used against the fairness of the TTT), two 200+ kilometre flat stages in the Netherlands, one of which followed the coast and resulted in major echelon action, and a 200+ kilometre stage with dirt roads (which also had rain). Even before the L'Aquila stage that set the race into overdrive with the 50-man break and lack of control, Vino and Evans had a solid amount of time gained on Basso, Nibali, Scarponi and co., but Vino had lost a domestique and Evans had lost two. Both would be down to four helpers after stage 11. So you can get it right with a lack of time trial mileage and a good balance between the flatter stages and the mountain stages for time gap potential - but it's a much harder job to get right that way.

 

[Andy schleck]

I'm not sure if Vingegaard has to rely on Pog having a bad day. I think his likely superior recovery could give him the edge on this course.

stages 13 through 17 are pretty hard by recent TDF standards.

stage 13 Unipuerto MTF
stage 14: almost 4,300 m elevation gain
stage 15: 4,700 m +

stage 17: 5,400 m +


The stage 16 ITT is underrated, I think. Great design and pretty hard despite its distance.

Stage 13 is not a unipuerto. I think they will pass col du ballon before grand colombier.

 

[houtdffan]

Prudhomme is now saying TTs paralyze the race

He and Govenou should be fired into the sun

 

[Big Doopie]

i am now convinced that prudhomme has to go. he clearly does not understand what ails cycling and what makes cycling memorable.

He mentions 2015 as a TDF that had even less ITT (though it had a TTT that he is not including). Do we really remember anything significant that happened in 2015? Really only Froome's crushing performance on the first MTF. And that goes exactly to the root of the issue. What is memorable in cycling? Great performances and great defeats. Not 10 riders within a couple of minutes waiting three weeks to attack each other because they fear any time loss will drop them out of the top ten (Giro 2022?)

Frankly, you can go down the history of cycling and it is precisely the great performances and defeats one remembers.

What is the most memorable thing about the 2018 Giro?
Whether you love him or hate him, it is Froome's ride over Finestre.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1969 TDF?
Merckx's crushing ride in the Pyrenees.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1971 TDF?
Ocana's crushing ride in the mountains putting the TDF seemingly completely out of reach by minutes.
Ocana's dramatic crash.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1973 TDF?
Ocana's crushing ride in the mountains putting the TDF seemingly completely out of reach by 10 + minutes.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1975 TDF?
Merckx's dramatic collapse on Pra Loup basically ending his career just as everyone thought he was putting the cherry on the cake.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1979 TDF?
Hinault's crushing ride in the Avoriaz MTT.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1984 TDF?
L'Alpe stage where Hinault vainly attacked and then got crushed by Fignon (though Fignon was already minutes ahead on GC).

What is the most memorable thing about the 1986 TDF?
Hinault's apparently crushing ride leaving LeMond 5 minutes behind.
Hinault's dramatic collapse the very next day, losing minutes.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1989 TDF?
There were really only two riders in contention after stage 5 (73 km TT), and yet it is considered the greatest TDF ever. And we remember Fignon collapsing to the ground on the Champs...and Lemond dazzling final ITT.

What is the most memorable thing about the 1992 TDF?
Indurain's superhuman ITT in Luxembourg crushing all rivals even before hitting the Alps.
Chiappucci's superhuman 200+ km escapade to Sestrieres.

What is the most memorable thing about the 2013 TDF?
Like him or hate him, Froome's crushing of Contador on Ventoux.

...and it goes on and on...

Tightness at the top of GC does NOT lead necessarily to memorable racing. In fact, the opposite is most often true.

Great champions doing great dominant rides or collapsing in surprising defeat is literally what we remember in cycling primarily.

 

[hrotha]

It's amazing that we just had one of the best Tours in the last 20 years, one which had only a short ITT to begin the race and a meaningless ITT at the end. Basically, the ITTs stayed out of the way of the real racing. Yet posters want to return to 2012? Or the even worse Tours before that?

One good Tour doesn't outweigh a gazillion terrible Tours based on the same model

 

[tobydawq]

One good Tour doesn't outweigh a gazillion terrible Tours based on the same model

We have had four good Tours in a row. Sure, there were a couple of dud stages in 2020 and 2021 was decided early but they definitely weren't bad races.

 

[Red Rick]

If I have to award bonus points for basic, okay things then I also have to give penalty points for when things are offensively bad.

And there's a lot of the offensively bad going around.

 

[fbjim]

2015 also had more of a "justification" to have fewer TTs because at that point you had the uh, "impressive" form of Sky where the only reason that race was competitive at all was because there wasn't a TT where Froome could crush the field by minutes.

The Sky issue is less of a thing nowadays and there are more riders who can keep the race competitive even with TTs (cue the "Remco will take 45 minutes out of Pogacar on a 6km prologue" posts) so there's not much danger of having the race end after the first ITT.

 

[fbjim]

We have had four good Tours in a row. Sure, there were a couple of dud stages in 2020 and 2021 was decided early but they definitely weren't bad races.

2020 was not particularly great despite the memorable ending. The Pyrenees were good but they were good because, guess what, a major contender lost time on a crosswind stage and was forced to attack. Of course that can happen in any race, but it still demonstrates that having major GC contenders be forced to get back time can lead to good racing, unlike Jumbo attempting to choke the race to death until the final TT.

 

[tobydawq]

If I have to award bonus points for basic, okay things then I also have to give penalty points for when things are offensively bad.

And there's a lot of the offensively bad going around.

Sure, sure.

I don't think it takes much for the PWU to be offended, though.

 

[tobydawq]

2020 was not particularly great despite the memorable ending. The Pyrenees were good but they were good because, guess what, a major contender lost time on a crosswind stage and was forced to attack. Of course that can happen in any race, but it still demonstrates that having major GC contenders be forced to get back time can lead to good racing, unlike Jumbo attempting to choke the race to death until the final TT.

That hardly disqualifies the Pyrenees being good...

 

[yaco]

On reflection, I love the route - It has punchy finishes at the beginning, some tough mountain stages, some decent transitional stages and enough sprint stages - It's a route that suits all riders.

 

[DNP-Old]

On reflection, I love the route - It has punchy finishes at the beginning, some tough mountain stages, some decent transitional stages and enough sprint stages - It's a route that suits all riders.

Except the time trialists.

 

[Will4563]

I don't think the amount of TT Kilometres is a big deal. Last year Vingegaard was 39 seconds from Pogacar at the start of the Granon stage. 8 of those seconds was from a TT. With the top riders we have right now, we do not need many TT Kilometres. Pogacar and Vingegaard is almost as fast as each other. At the 40 Km TT there was also 8 seconds between them. But everybody else was miles behind. The next person from the top 10 (Vlasov) was 2 and a half minute behind them. It isn't the TT that creates the gap, there make them attack. It just send everybody else minutes behind. And it won't prevent Pogacar or Vingegaard from attacking, the want to win, a second place isn't good enough. It just give everybody else a bigger chance, so we wont get a battle between Vingegaard and Pogacar the next 10 years. And riders like Bernal and Carapz (Maybe Mas) there can compet against them in the mountains, will also get a bigger chance to win, so more people would attack.

 

[ice&fire]

The two big favourites are almost equal in the ITT and also happen to climb faster than the pure climbers. A longer ITT would change very little.