First thing's first, any stage race route where Team Time Trial mileage exceeds Individual Time Trial mileage has no business scoring above 5. That is an automatic limitation. Not sure how a race can be 'more balanced' for the stronger time trialling contender when their speciality is so marginalized.
Next significant problem: the opening of the race is absolutely execrable and couldn't be worse if they tried. I really despise this movement to try to make sure a complete one-trick pony of a sprinter like Kittel who openly admits he won't even try to defend the jersey if there's any obstacles gets a chance to wear the maillot jaune. Leading a GT is supposed to be an honour and when it's treated like a joke by the organizers, a free gift to riders who don't care because they already get a bazillion chances to win anyway, it erodes some of that prestige. Placing the only stage which could have any long term relevance in the opening section of the race on stage 3, so on a weekday, while we get two pan-flat sprints that are liable to produce absolutely zero memorable racing moments, is another piece of bizarre logic when you consider that the stage towns are close enough to one another that changing the order wouldn't have actually made too much of a difference. And anyway, why has "prologue" become a dirty word? I have no problem in fairness with the 10-15km ITTs used in 2009, 2015 and 2017, if anything in the days of marginal TTing they're better, but did you realise the last time the Tour opened with a prologue in France was 2006? 2012 had a prologue but was overseas, like in all of those other editions starting with ITTs, come to think of it. Cholet hosted a perfectly good 30km ITT in 2008, that would have been fine since 3 MTFs, an early Cholet TT and a late ITT would have matched 2008's format. Instead, we get a TTT which is longer than the only ITT in the race, and negates one of the only things that people are able to use to defend the format ("it looks cool") by putting it on a weekday when fewer people can see it (because heaven forfend we miss an exciting Marcel Kittel special). And as for the only other argument people put in favour of a TTT ("it forces more balanced selections of rouleurs and climbers"), that's rather negated by the inclusion of tougher rouleur stages that would necessitate a more balanced selection anyway, so the TTT serves no purpose other than its usual purpose, to ensure the strongest teams get a head start. Stage 4 is also utter mediocrity from the details given.
Finally, then, things start to improve. I don't agree with the interpretation of the Quimper stage that it's the hilliest week 1 stage since 2014; for one thing, we had a freaking Planche des Belles Filles MTF on stage 5 this year. The toughest climb noted in the profile is still only 3km @ 6,2%; the Bréton climbs are not real muritos, the stage is not as tough as Sheffield 2014 or Spa 2010 and this is going to be more like an easier Amstel Gold than anything else; obviously the Tour du Finistère is the clear precedent but perhaps the Sittard-Geleen Eneco/Binck-Bank stages are more what we ought to be looking at. There's real disappointment at no ribinou, but this also has a lot more potential for wind affecting the race than most races of comparable profile. This will be an interesting stage, but the y-axis makes people think the hills are going to be more selective than they are. Time gaps here won't be herculean unless it goes Paris-Nice stage 1 level bonkers which I don't expect in July, however if somebody gets it wrong they could rue their mistake for two and a half weeks. However, I can't really complain about the Mûr-de-Brétagne stage; the climb is becoming a predictable stop-off, so doing the double-climb with a finishing circuit (which is a rarity for the Tour compared to the Giro and Vuelta which seem much less fazed by circuits) is a good way to try to prevent it just being a final 2km shootout; I used that exact idea in a Tour route in the Race Design Thread, so while I don't have much love for the continual reuse of the same site, I am pleasantly surprised with what they're doing with it.
So, ASO punish me for my insolence with two straight garbage sprint stages, one of which is on a weekend, making it 3 sprints out of 3 on weekend stages. Awesome show, guys, great job. At least the Chartres stage is potentially going to suit a different kind of sprinter, with good distance, but it's pretty disappointing that the longest stage of the race is one where nothing will matter outside of the last 200m. Especially when the real rouleur's test, the second Sunday's cobbled odyssey, is only 150km long. Add another 30km (I don't want to be greedy) and we could be golden. The stage is already interesting, but I feel it pretty disappointing that we have to wait this long for a stage that the majority of cycling fans can watch live that will actually give them a justification for watching.
So after 9 stages in which about 3 climbs will make it above cat.4 level, in another example of glorious, wonderful ASO pacing, the Alpine trifecta is perfectly placed to go in the middle of the week when the most people can't watch because they're at work. Awesome show, guys, great job. Now, the Alpine stages in and of themselves I don't actually have much of a problem with. The stage to Le Grand-Bornand is fine; it has some clear similarities with a stage to the same town that I designed in the Race Design Thread in fact, including Glières and the Romme-Colombière double not seen since 2009. I did also include the Col de la Ramaz to try to put more difficulty in closer to that final double-climb, but this is also the first stage with any reasonable climbing, so there won't be much in the way of form guide at this point. The real problem is the pacing of the three stages but given the direction, it's difficult for ASO to do much about that unless they flipped some stage hosts. The Albertville stage also includes a few traceur favourites - Mont Bisanne, Col du Pré - but I do feel that placing the 100km mini-stage here will nullify a lot of what has made these anæmic espoir mountain stages work, which is that they don't induce fear that paralyses racing on earlier stages, and riders are less afraid of exhausting themselves and less exhausted when they reach the key points in the stage. The problem is, just giving people a short mountain stage and expecting lightning in a bottle like Formigal, Andalo or Alpe d'Huez 2011 is a solution looking for a problem; it has to be worked into the right context. While we may get excited about the action of those shorter stages, plenty of the mountain stages that have given us the most action and excitement in recent years haven't been the super-short ones, but we don't use Aprica 2010, Galibier 2011, Risoul 2016, Fuente Dé, Cercedilla or Sestrières 2015 as justifications for NOT shortening mountain stages in the same way as we use the successful short mountain stages as examples why they are a positive move. Stuff like Oropa 2017 proved that just giving people a short mountain stage doesn't work in and of itself, it's how it works with the rest of the route. ASO actually do the short mountain stage right later in the race, but here I am skeptical; the final climb is pretty meh, and with the queen stage the following day, it's not conducive to attacks from distance on the Col du Pré when there's only been one stage to test out peoples' climbing legs beforehand.
Similarly, in a vacuum the Alpe d'Huez stage is great; it uses three monolithic HC climbs, finishing at the most famous one of them all. However, for reasons of geography it also runs the risk of neutralizing much of the racing on the preceding two stages, because it has the toughest and longest MTF and the most climbing of the three stages. This isn't something ASO can help; indeed fantasy-writing the stages into a better order is simply impossible here because of the rest of the geography of the race and the route they need to travel, but it does mean that two stages that are good on paper have a good chance of being disappointments.
Still, after a transitional stage (placed on a weekday to leave room for worthwhile stages at a weekend, praise be to Allah, God and any other deity to whom you may or may not have reverence) we move on to the penultimate weekend. Mende is pretty predictable, sure it can produce some ok gaps, but surely there's more to the Massif Central than just the one climb. Climb the other side and descend into the town or something one year, for goodness' sake. Look at all those beautiful climbs into and out of the Causses, Millau is hosting the Tour, can't we do something with them? The Carcassonne stage doesn't seem too bad from a distance, but with the Pyrenean stages following immediately, even with a rest day I can't see anybody of consequence being desperate enough to launch a move on the Pic du Nore, which I think could only work with Mazamet as a realistic host. Otherwise, this is pure fodder for a fight from the breakaway with middling guys fighting out the stage win while the main contenders roll in together 17 minutes later.
So we arrive at the Pyrenées, and in true ASO form, this has been perfectly timed to make sure that absolutely zero interesting mountain stages take place on prime viewing days. Awesome show, guys, great job. At least the Portillón stage is sufficiently long, but with the super-hard MTF to Portet coming the following day and given that Portillón east is not the most threatening of climbs (cat.2 most realistically) I'm not convinced I see too much action here even if the Portet stage is shorter than most women's semitappes. Maybe if they could climb from Bossòst to the Mirador d'Arres and then Portillón at the end to bring the distance up past 230km and add another cat.1/2 climb (around 7km @ 8,5%) this would work better - after all, as mentioned, the short mountain stages are not a problem in and of themselves, if used correctly and in balance; they are not an answer in and of themselves, which unfortunately they're being used as (which ties in with a lot of other sports' preference for tending towards shorter, more explosive versions of themselves, because it's easier to propose a shorter form condensing the action to marketing execs than to actually figure out why you've been having trouble generating the action in the traditional form of the sport, and rectifying it). Without the long and tough stages preceding them, Formigal and Alpe d'Huez 2011 almost certainly wouldn't have worked out as successfully as they did. Make the Luchon stage really long and a step tougher, and those domestiques' legs will be really feeling it when they start their fight in the super-short stage the next day, which makes the kind of distance action that we've seen in shorter stages more likely.
Now, I'm not that big a fan of it and it's become an everpresent since its introduction, but if they aren't going to toughen up the Luchon stage, then the Portet stage is crying out for Port de Balès. Adding a loop from Luchon to include the climb only adds around 50k, so you still only have a 115km stage, but this would have it both starting and finishing with an HC climb, whereas it's quite possible that given that the final climb is so brutal - one of the toughest ever in the Tour, certainly as an MTF - and that, crucially, it hasn't been seen in racing before, riders may be more circumspect with just the well-known Peyresourde and Azet preceding it. At the same time, the fact the climb hasn't been seen in racing before is a very important factor in its favour; many everpresent climbs have now reached the point where every rider knows them like the back of their hand, they know when to dose their efforts, when to go hard, when is the best place to attack, and so on. This makes taking people by surprise or making big leaps that gain time harder, because everybody else is thinking the same way as you. On a climb you've not taken on in racing conditions before, that's harder to do. You may have tried it in training, but somebody else might have done it at a different time and got a different feel for it than you. You may not have been in optimum form when you were training there, so you have no idea how your body will react in peak conditions; no amount of reconnaissance truly replicates race scenarios on a new climb, so this stage is really a big gamble.
I just know that if it succeeds, I don't trust ASO to take the right messages from it, and before you know it every mountain stage will last less than 2 hours until there's no endurance left in the sport except for specialist dinosaurs, a relic of the sport's past, who come out to play in spring to race Sanremo, which will one day be seen as archaic and comically overlong as Bordeaux-Paris and Paris-Brest-Paris are now. Obviously it won't happen just like that, overnight, but considering what Unipublic learnt from 2012 was "we need more MTFs" and what ASO learnt from 2011 was not "a short mountain stage towards the end of a chain reduces the fear of exhaustion in earlier stages, and enables stronger racing in long mountain stages before that where domestiques will find it harder to control" or "if we backload the race entirely people crash out left right and centre, but if major contenders ride like lobotomy patients for the first two weeks so they're desperate when we get to the finish, their desperation moves will save the race, but we can't rely on that" but instead "we did a short mountain stage and it was good. We need short mountain stages ALL THE TIME AND EVERYWHERE" we have precedent for something capturing lightning in a bottle, and then them going back to the well over and over again.
On the plus side, we then have a transitional stage meaning no reason not to lay it all on the line. Then we have a potentially good medium-mountain stage masquerading as a high mountain stage, plus raising my ire further by including the Tourmalet. Making the final climb of the race the Aubisque by its easiest side and moving the toughest gradients down the hill breaking it up into three seems to be a counterintuitive move in respect of making the race; separating it from the ITT might have been better (oh yes, this final roll of the dice stage is on Friday. ASO, ladies and gentlemen) as it does mean that anybody close enough to victory at this stage is unlikely not to be hoping to defend in the ITT, so realistically the only people who will be interested in lighting this up from afar with the only ITT of the race coming up the next day are riders whose TT skills are so chronic they wouldn't have been a challenger anyway. Then we have the only ITT of the race, which in my world should be a good 20km longer to complement the 30km Cholet TT earlier on.
So, ultimately, rating it. Ultimately because of that fundamental flaw I originally mentioned, 5/10 is the absolute maximum I could possibly give it even if everything else was ideal. And everything else is far from ideal and there are some really fundamental flaws that mean I really can't comprehend some of these scores of 7 or even 8. 8!!! However, ASO have done some interesting things that mean it doesn't merit the Hepatitis/10 rating that some of the worst offerings such as 2009 and 2012 did either. They certainly haven't made the best race out there, but the fact that in at least a couple of stages they've produced the best stage that would be realistically achievable is a big step forward. I would like one really good long mountain stage to counterbalance the shorter ones - the Alpe stage and Luchon stage are both almost that but both lacking something to really complete the job; I would desperately like some pacing issues to be resolved to prevent this situation where 4 out of 8 weekend stages are sprints and 0 are mountain stages; the first three days are clearly intended to prevent any first-time or once-a-year viewers from accidentally being entertained and thus tuning in to any further days' coverage. A mountain stage is not just short, but shorter than this year's La Course, which was considered an insultingly short distance for women's cycling (maybe that is the point, so they can still have an insultingly short La Course, but can let the women do exactly the same course as the men this time... I jest but... am actually kind of convincing myself this is plausible). And, this bears repeating, there is more TTT mileage than ITT mileage.
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