Oh, that doesn't matter at all, though. You know these people take one glance on the route beforehand, see only one stage above 200 kms and just one ITT, decide it's crap and then attribute any actual excitement to chance, thus making it insignificant, because we can't have the prevailing theories regarding course design challenged by things so pedestrian as real, non-virtual, non-simulated racing.
This.
The route and the race are related, but at the same time they are totally different entities.
I rated the 2020 Tour (race) a 7. I would probably rate the route a 5.
It is very hard for me to give any route that has less than 50 kms of flattish ITTing a high rating, and this one only had 30. To make matters worse, immediately after those 30 kms followed yet another ascent of PDBF.
Yet one of the things that was actually the worst about the parcours, turned out to be one of the best things about the race. Stage 20 was a 10/10, or at least a 9. As far as the racing aspect goes. But I would still rate it pretty low for stage design.
Or how about this almost now mythical stage 6? It was a nice idea to put this new climb into the Tour, and to maybe alter the GC a little in week one. ASO even gave the riders likely easier days on stages 5 and 7, making action on stage 6 somewhat likely. But as it turned out, as far as the racing aspect goes, it was a 0/10, or maybe a 1 (for Astana's past and present).
I was very gullible about Red Rick's 8 rating, and part of that was for his reference to new climbs. I think this is something that the Tour has done pretty well in recent times. New climbs, and more potentially decisive mountain stages outside of the Alps and Pyrenees. Maybe it was just Armstrong's dominance clouding my view, but I recall those Tours as basically 5 high mountain stages, 2 or 3 time trials, 1 other mildly interesting GC stage if we were lucky, with the rest of stages being much ado about nothing.
We never used to see stages like 13 and 15 in previous eras of the Tour. We only ever saw them in the two main mountain regions.
But of course the Tour can do better. They can give us longer multi mountain stages. Likes stages 18 and 20 of this years Giro.
But for next year, it seems that the majority will be happy with a long flat ITT, a MTF on Granon, and if the Pyrenees are last, I reckon that you can't do too much better than the first three Pyrenean stages of the 2003 edition. In the same order. Some people are calling for AX3 and Luz Ardiden anyway.