- Sep 20, 2017
- 11,643
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(as mentioned in the thread planning thread, the full stage-by-stage analysis, of which this post will be a part, is in the works, but I'm running late)
For the first time since 2021, the Grand Départ is on home soil. Recent opening stages in France don’t exactly have the best trackrecord – half the GC riders crashing and losing time in 2018, the rain-soaked chaos in 2020, and the Opi-Omi fiasco in 2021 – so this stage being both flat and in an area with twisty roads that is prone to inclement weather does not exactly alleviate my concerns…
Map and profile
(insert annual complaint about the terrible resolution of the official route material here)
Start
The 2025 Tour starts from Lille, the fourth-largest city in France by urban area (not counting the Belgian parts of the conurbation). It was founded by the Counts of Flanders in the 11th century. The County of Flanders does not correspond to what we conceive of as Flanders today, but rather refers to the areas west of the Scheldt river: what is now Zeelandic Flanders in the southwestern corner of the Netherlands, East Flanders, West Flanders and the area around Tournai in Belgium, and the area from Dunkerque to Douai in France. The County was nominally a part of the Kingdom of France, but largely independent in practice. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, it developed into one of the richest and most urbanised areas in Europe thanks mainly to its flourishing cloth industry. Lille was one of the centres of both production and trade, growing to around 10000 inhabitants by the end of this era.
And then, both Lille and Flanders got caught up in the complicated entanglement of wars, marriages and inheritances that saw the patchwork of European feudal domains very gradually coalesce into more centralised, clearly-defined entities. This period begins with the Franco-Flemish War between 1297 and 1305, the loss which forced Flanders and its cities into severe reparation payments that, combined with the Black Death, led to prolonged decline. Lille itself was annexed by the French, but was reunited with Flanders when the County came under Burgundian control in 1369. The Dukes of Burgundy (or Bourgogne) were formally subject to the French kings, but in practice among the most powerful rulers in Western Europe by this point, with territory from the Netherlands to the Alps.
However, the Burgundian era abruptly ended when the last duke died without a male heir in 1477. His lands were contested by France and the Habsburgs, who arranged a marriage with the late duke’s only daughter. The Low Countries, then still including Lille, went to the latter. This would prove to be a fairly momentous occasion: although the reigning Habsburg archduke had been elected Holy Roman Emperor by this point, the area he held in his own right was not much larger than modern Austria. However, the acquisition of the Low Countries proved to be the start of a series of well-timed marriages, wars and inheritances, and just a few decades later the Habsburgs had also gained control of Spain, half of Italy, large swathes of Central Europe and a vast colonial empire. This empire was then partitioned into the Austrian Empire (the Central European part) and the Spanish Empire (the rest, thereby including Lille) in 1556.
Thankfully, the 16th century is also roughly when the European political situation stops being so inconstant and confusing, and so we can finally go back to talking about things more directly concerning Lille. Both the Burgundian and the early Habsburg period saw new heights in terms of prosperity for both the city and Flanders in general, however the Spanish Empire – the greatest power in the world at the time of partition – was characterised by general mismanagement. As it turns out, it is not a great idea to constantly overextend yourself in wars (partially because of your dogmatic religious policies) that you struggle to pay for because of a frankly terrible economic and taxation system that somehow never manages to leverage the huge amount of wealth out of the Americas in particular that none of the other European countries could compete with. The Low Countries were a perfect microcosm: an attempt to suppress the Reformation in what is now the Netherlands led to a war of independence that Spain refused to concede for no less than 80 years, thereby exhausting the Empire in general and the part of the Low Countries (including Lille) it retained control of and causing a shift in the centre of Low Country economic gravity to the provinces that had declared independence. Of particular cost to Flanders was the Dutch hegemony at sea, with Spain being forced to accept the closure of the Flemish ports. From the mid-17th century onwards, the Spanish started to lose control of territory on a routine basis, especially at the hands of France. In one such war, the French successfully annexed part of Flanders, and thus Lille became a part of France from 1667 onwards.
For significant parts of French Flanders, over 300 years of French rule have often been dominated by forced francisation, but Lille had never been Flemish-speaking and thus no longer being tethered to a dying empire was more of a boon in the long term. The first years after the conquest saw urban expansion, including the construction of the citadel. Its economy, historically reliant on manufacturing, boomed especially in the 19th century, with its textile industry reaching new heights and the mining of the country’s largest coal deposits just south of the city putting the region at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution (notwithstanding the social and health effects). However, this combination of economic importance and proximity to the border also meant that it was often a theatre of war: occupied by the Dutch in the War of the Spanish Succession between 1708 and 1713, besieged by Austria during the Revolutionary Wars in 1792, and narrowly on the German side of the front lines throughout the First World War. The latter in particular caused heavy damage.
After the Second World War, production of both coal and textile went into decline. Many surrounding cities are still reeling from this, however Lille has been quite successful at transitioning to a service-based economy, thanks in no small part to its location at the junction of the high-speed railway lines to London, Paris and Brussels. In addition, it is home to one of the largest universities in the country, formerly the seat of Louis Pasteur, whose name of course lives on in pasteurization (a process he patented) but who was also responsible – amongst other things – for large parts of the proof that diseases are caused by germs. On the subject of famous Frenchmen, Lille is also the birthplace of such figures as Charles de Gaulle, World War II general and probably the country’s best-known president.
As for sports, it is home to the eponymous football club, four-time national champions and the last team to beat the Paris Sportswashing Project to a league title (in 2021). In cycling, it has naturally been overshadowed by neighbouring Roubaix, however it has still seen 33 Tours prior to this one. Two of those visits (1960 and 1994) were also Grand Départs, with the most recent outing coming in 2022 as the start of the Arenberg stage won by Simon Clarke.
The main square (picture by Donar Reiskoffer at Wikimedia Commons)
The route
The entire stage is more or less a triangle through all the areas near Lille that don’t have much in the way of cobbles. We start by heading southwest, heading into France’s coal belt. Notable stopoffs include Lens, hometown of 1998 Ligue 1 champions RC Lens and the finish of the new points farming race Classique Dunkerque, and the neighbouring town Liévin, which hosted this year’s cyclocross World Championships. On the outskirts of the latter, the Artesian hills rise up from the Lys plains. As this is the place where the Western Front in the First World War entered said hills, the hills just south of Liévin were the most important place strategically in this area of the warzone. This resulted in this area seeing two extremely bloody offensives in 1915, together claiming around 300000 casualties. Most of them fell here, on a stretch of front approximately the length of Central Park... and then we haven’t even mentioned the many soldiers who lost their lives here at any other stage of the war. 40000 of the fallen were buried atop one of the hills, in the national war cemetery Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. It is this hill that serves as the first KOM of the Tour, making for possibly the most jarringly sombre setting ASO have ever selected.
The KOM also forms the second corner of the triangle, and the second side sees the riders head north. Early on in this section, there is an uncategorised and very easy hill, Côte d’Aix-Noulette.
The descent takes us out of the hills and back onto the plains. Although we are now (mostly) just behind the front line, the scars of the First World War are still everywhere. For example, in Béthune, the largest town in this part of the stage, much of the urban area was destroyed with over 100 civilians killed in a 1918 bombing. We then pass into the Houtland, which as you can tell by the name is one of the historically Flemish-speaking parts of French Flanders. Immediately after entering the area, it is time for the intermediate sprint in La Motte-au-Bois.
The next stopoff is Hazebrouck, birthplace of Cofidis manager Cédric Vasseur, then we enter the northern, hilly part of the Houtland, used by Gent-Wevelgem pre-Covid. Although this is the same range as the Kemmelberg, none of the climbs are quite so exciting. It doesn’t help that we take the single easiest side up Mont Cassel, which is very straightforward in spite of it being cobbled.
Once again the KOM is at the corner of the triangle, with the riders turning east here to continue heading through the hills without doing any of the harder climbs. The next ascent, a side of Mont des Récolllets of which I can’t find a profile, really is no more than a false flat, then at the Mont des Cats we are limited to the first 1.9 kilometres of the profile below courtesy of ASO’s decision not to go all the way up.
Only the last hill of the day, the KOM at Mont Noir, is somewhat more interesting, but with it standing effectively alone and there being 45 kilometres left to race, the sprinters have nothing to fear.
By this point, the riders are almost at the Belgian border and a straight line from here to Lille actually passes through the lower slopes of the Kemmelberg, but sadly we are staying on the French side. We are also firmly back in First World War territory: this was the area of the Lys offensive, part of Germany’s last and most brutal efforts to force the Entente into submission. In this offensive, they attempted to cut off the entire front from the ports on the Channel. Instead, they made it less than 20 kilometres west, pushing up to a line from Ieper over this very hill down to more or less the location of the intermediate sprint. The very worst of the fighting was on the Kemmelberg, but the destruction on this side of the border was still horrific, as evidenced by the next two towns the race passes through. Bailleul was almost completely levelled and the Germans so heavily shelled Armentières with mustard gas that they could not enter it for two weeks after the British retreated from the town. While of course not remotely comparable, Armentières also doesn’t have the most positive reputation in cycling, as this is where a policeman stepping into the road to take a photo brought down half the sprinting peloton in 1994. By the time the riders leave it, Lille is pretty close, and even with a short detour there are less than 30 fairly featureless kilometres left to race.
Finish
The 3k rule is a 5k rule in pretty much all of the sprint stages, but that isn’t the greatest decision here, as most of the route between 6k and 5k is on a road with a central reservation and only one lane plus a bike gutter to either side. Given that it isn’t marked on the map, it’s possible that they are removing the entire reservation for the race, but that would be an unusually large expense for a Tour stage. Between 3.9k and 1.4k from the line, there are five big turns to stretch things out, the first and third of which also form narrowings because of road furniture with the final one being fairly sharp (thankfully on wide roads) at about 110 degrees. The final 1.4k are arrow-straight with yet another central reservation for the most part, so it won’t be the widest of finishes. It’s also on a heavily tree-lined road, which will hinder the overhead shots.
What to expect?
A pretty nervy stage with a pretty nervy sprint.
For the first time since 2021, the Grand Départ is on home soil. Recent opening stages in France don’t exactly have the best trackrecord – half the GC riders crashing and losing time in 2018, the rain-soaked chaos in 2020, and the Opi-Omi fiasco in 2021 – so this stage being both flat and in an area with twisty roads that is prone to inclement weather does not exactly alleviate my concerns…
Map and profile
(insert annual complaint about the terrible resolution of the official route material here)
Start
The 2025 Tour starts from Lille, the fourth-largest city in France by urban area (not counting the Belgian parts of the conurbation). It was founded by the Counts of Flanders in the 11th century. The County of Flanders does not correspond to what we conceive of as Flanders today, but rather refers to the areas west of the Scheldt river: what is now Zeelandic Flanders in the southwestern corner of the Netherlands, East Flanders, West Flanders and the area around Tournai in Belgium, and the area from Dunkerque to Douai in France. The County was nominally a part of the Kingdom of France, but largely independent in practice. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, it developed into one of the richest and most urbanised areas in Europe thanks mainly to its flourishing cloth industry. Lille was one of the centres of both production and trade, growing to around 10000 inhabitants by the end of this era.
And then, both Lille and Flanders got caught up in the complicated entanglement of wars, marriages and inheritances that saw the patchwork of European feudal domains very gradually coalesce into more centralised, clearly-defined entities. This period begins with the Franco-Flemish War between 1297 and 1305, the loss which forced Flanders and its cities into severe reparation payments that, combined with the Black Death, led to prolonged decline. Lille itself was annexed by the French, but was reunited with Flanders when the County came under Burgundian control in 1369. The Dukes of Burgundy (or Bourgogne) were formally subject to the French kings, but in practice among the most powerful rulers in Western Europe by this point, with territory from the Netherlands to the Alps.
However, the Burgundian era abruptly ended when the last duke died without a male heir in 1477. His lands were contested by France and the Habsburgs, who arranged a marriage with the late duke’s only daughter. The Low Countries, then still including Lille, went to the latter. This would prove to be a fairly momentous occasion: although the reigning Habsburg archduke had been elected Holy Roman Emperor by this point, the area he held in his own right was not much larger than modern Austria. However, the acquisition of the Low Countries proved to be the start of a series of well-timed marriages, wars and inheritances, and just a few decades later the Habsburgs had also gained control of Spain, half of Italy, large swathes of Central Europe and a vast colonial empire. This empire was then partitioned into the Austrian Empire (the Central European part) and the Spanish Empire (the rest, thereby including Lille) in 1556.
Thankfully, the 16th century is also roughly when the European political situation stops being so inconstant and confusing, and so we can finally go back to talking about things more directly concerning Lille. Both the Burgundian and the early Habsburg period saw new heights in terms of prosperity for both the city and Flanders in general, however the Spanish Empire – the greatest power in the world at the time of partition – was characterised by general mismanagement. As it turns out, it is not a great idea to constantly overextend yourself in wars (partially because of your dogmatic religious policies) that you struggle to pay for because of a frankly terrible economic and taxation system that somehow never manages to leverage the huge amount of wealth out of the Americas in particular that none of the other European countries could compete with. The Low Countries were a perfect microcosm: an attempt to suppress the Reformation in what is now the Netherlands led to a war of independence that Spain refused to concede for no less than 80 years, thereby exhausting the Empire in general and the part of the Low Countries (including Lille) it retained control of and causing a shift in the centre of Low Country economic gravity to the provinces that had declared independence. Of particular cost to Flanders was the Dutch hegemony at sea, with Spain being forced to accept the closure of the Flemish ports. From the mid-17th century onwards, the Spanish started to lose control of territory on a routine basis, especially at the hands of France. In one such war, the French successfully annexed part of Flanders, and thus Lille became a part of France from 1667 onwards.
For significant parts of French Flanders, over 300 years of French rule have often been dominated by forced francisation, but Lille had never been Flemish-speaking and thus no longer being tethered to a dying empire was more of a boon in the long term. The first years after the conquest saw urban expansion, including the construction of the citadel. Its economy, historically reliant on manufacturing, boomed especially in the 19th century, with its textile industry reaching new heights and the mining of the country’s largest coal deposits just south of the city putting the region at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution (notwithstanding the social and health effects). However, this combination of economic importance and proximity to the border also meant that it was often a theatre of war: occupied by the Dutch in the War of the Spanish Succession between 1708 and 1713, besieged by Austria during the Revolutionary Wars in 1792, and narrowly on the German side of the front lines throughout the First World War. The latter in particular caused heavy damage.
After the Second World War, production of both coal and textile went into decline. Many surrounding cities are still reeling from this, however Lille has been quite successful at transitioning to a service-based economy, thanks in no small part to its location at the junction of the high-speed railway lines to London, Paris and Brussels. In addition, it is home to one of the largest universities in the country, formerly the seat of Louis Pasteur, whose name of course lives on in pasteurization (a process he patented) but who was also responsible – amongst other things – for large parts of the proof that diseases are caused by germs. On the subject of famous Frenchmen, Lille is also the birthplace of such figures as Charles de Gaulle, World War II general and probably the country’s best-known president.
As for sports, it is home to the eponymous football club, four-time national champions and the last team to beat the Paris Sportswashing Project to a league title (in 2021). In cycling, it has naturally been overshadowed by neighbouring Roubaix, however it has still seen 33 Tours prior to this one. Two of those visits (1960 and 1994) were also Grand Départs, with the most recent outing coming in 2022 as the start of the Arenberg stage won by Simon Clarke.
The main square (picture by Donar Reiskoffer at Wikimedia Commons)
The route
The entire stage is more or less a triangle through all the areas near Lille that don’t have much in the way of cobbles. We start by heading southwest, heading into France’s coal belt. Notable stopoffs include Lens, hometown of 1998 Ligue 1 champions RC Lens and the finish of the new points farming race Classique Dunkerque, and the neighbouring town Liévin, which hosted this year’s cyclocross World Championships. On the outskirts of the latter, the Artesian hills rise up from the Lys plains. As this is the place where the Western Front in the First World War entered said hills, the hills just south of Liévin were the most important place strategically in this area of the warzone. This resulted in this area seeing two extremely bloody offensives in 1915, together claiming around 300000 casualties. Most of them fell here, on a stretch of front approximately the length of Central Park... and then we haven’t even mentioned the many soldiers who lost their lives here at any other stage of the war. 40000 of the fallen were buried atop one of the hills, in the national war cemetery Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. It is this hill that serves as the first KOM of the Tour, making for possibly the most jarringly sombre setting ASO have ever selected.
The KOM also forms the second corner of the triangle, and the second side sees the riders head north. Early on in this section, there is an uncategorised and very easy hill, Côte d’Aix-Noulette.
The descent takes us out of the hills and back onto the plains. Although we are now (mostly) just behind the front line, the scars of the First World War are still everywhere. For example, in Béthune, the largest town in this part of the stage, much of the urban area was destroyed with over 100 civilians killed in a 1918 bombing. We then pass into the Houtland, which as you can tell by the name is one of the historically Flemish-speaking parts of French Flanders. Immediately after entering the area, it is time for the intermediate sprint in La Motte-au-Bois.
The next stopoff is Hazebrouck, birthplace of Cofidis manager Cédric Vasseur, then we enter the northern, hilly part of the Houtland, used by Gent-Wevelgem pre-Covid. Although this is the same range as the Kemmelberg, none of the climbs are quite so exciting. It doesn’t help that we take the single easiest side up Mont Cassel, which is very straightforward in spite of it being cobbled.
Once again the KOM is at the corner of the triangle, with the riders turning east here to continue heading through the hills without doing any of the harder climbs. The next ascent, a side of Mont des Récolllets of which I can’t find a profile, really is no more than a false flat, then at the Mont des Cats we are limited to the first 1.9 kilometres of the profile below courtesy of ASO’s decision not to go all the way up.
Only the last hill of the day, the KOM at Mont Noir, is somewhat more interesting, but with it standing effectively alone and there being 45 kilometres left to race, the sprinters have nothing to fear.
By this point, the riders are almost at the Belgian border and a straight line from here to Lille actually passes through the lower slopes of the Kemmelberg, but sadly we are staying on the French side. We are also firmly back in First World War territory: this was the area of the Lys offensive, part of Germany’s last and most brutal efforts to force the Entente into submission. In this offensive, they attempted to cut off the entire front from the ports on the Channel. Instead, they made it less than 20 kilometres west, pushing up to a line from Ieper over this very hill down to more or less the location of the intermediate sprint. The very worst of the fighting was on the Kemmelberg, but the destruction on this side of the border was still horrific, as evidenced by the next two towns the race passes through. Bailleul was almost completely levelled and the Germans so heavily shelled Armentières with mustard gas that they could not enter it for two weeks after the British retreated from the town. While of course not remotely comparable, Armentières also doesn’t have the most positive reputation in cycling, as this is where a policeman stepping into the road to take a photo brought down half the sprinting peloton in 1994. By the time the riders leave it, Lille is pretty close, and even with a short detour there are less than 30 fairly featureless kilometres left to race.
Finish
The 3k rule is a 5k rule in pretty much all of the sprint stages, but that isn’t the greatest decision here, as most of the route between 6k and 5k is on a road with a central reservation and only one lane plus a bike gutter to either side. Given that it isn’t marked on the map, it’s possible that they are removing the entire reservation for the race, but that would be an unusually large expense for a Tour stage. Between 3.9k and 1.4k from the line, there are five big turns to stretch things out, the first and third of which also form narrowings because of road furniture with the final one being fairly sharp (thankfully on wide roads) at about 110 degrees. The final 1.4k are arrow-straight with yet another central reservation for the most part, so it won’t be the widest of finishes. It’s also on a heavily tree-lined road, which will hinder the overhead shots.
What to expect?
A pretty nervy stage with a pretty nervy sprint.
Last edited:
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