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@Devil's Elbow Thank you for your service to the CN Forum community. Lovely stage design on the weekend, should be a snoozefest.
Stage 8: Saint-Méen-le-Grand – Laval (171.4k)
In which ASO gives everyone who can’t watch on weekdays the finger.Map and profile
Start
The final Breton stage host in this edition is Saint-Méen-le-Grand. The abbey for which it is named dates back to the 6th century, with an 11th- or 12th-century church surviving to the present day. The village that eventually developed around it was very small for centuries, finally developing into a small town courtesy of the arrival of a railroad in the late 19th century. That railway is now defunct, but it is close enough to Rennes to have transformed into a minor commuter town.
But of course, the only thing Saint-Méen-le-Grand is known for is cycling. It is the hometown of Louison Bobet, who became both the first winner of three consecutive Tours as well as the first winner of four different monuments (although the term had not yet been conceived at the time) in the 1950s. Having had to deal with numerous prior health problems – severe saddle sores during his career that even required the operational removal of an abscess directly after his final Tour win, a double femur break that ended his career, the removal of an infected kidney – he died rather young, losing the battle with brain cancer at 58. In addition to the great champion, Saint-Méen has produced more than its fair share of cyclists: Bobet’s younger brother Jean, a good rider in his own right who won Paris-Nice, and the final French Paris-Roubaix winner in Frédéric Guesdon, who between his active career and his work as a DS has been with Groupama-FDJ almost uninterruptedly since the team was launched in 1997. The Tour has been here on one previous occasion, for a stage start in 2006.
(picture by chisloup at Panoramio, reuploaded to Wikimedia Commons)
The route
Now I know I have a reputation for complaining, but there are cases where I’m obliged to do so and this is one of them. Because let’s face it, this second weekend is terrible. It’s already bad planning to have the part of your route where you need to transition through flatter terrain on a weekend, but even with those self-imposed constraints ASO have handled this about as poorly as they could have. And the teams won’t be much happier than the fans – the stage hosts are in incredibly inefficient positions, saddling everyone with long transfers on both Saturday and Sunday night.
But I digress. The first half of the stage is rolling, but there is nothing that would have worried even the most onedimensional sprinters had this been the second half. The Côte de Liffré, pictured below, is about as hard as the ‘climbing’ gets.
This rolling section ends around the point we make it to the intermediate sprint, in Vitré, a well-preserved medieval town that is the host of the Route Adélie.
The passage through Vitré heralds multiple sorts of change. Aside from the landscape becoming flatter, the route stops being direct, instead heading on a southern detour that lasts the rest of the day, and the border between Bretagne and Maine (the original one, obviously) is crossed shortly thereafter. Towards the end of the stage, the roads become a bit more rolling once more, and ASO have seized the opportunity to insert this sad excuse for a mountain sprint. In fairness, it is 1.4 kilometres at 3.8% rather than the 900 metres claimed by the official profile, which would have made it possibly the easiest cat. 4 in Tour history.
Finish
A very unusual finale for the Tour, with the final 4 kilometres being entirely on the ring road and the 180-degree turn at the big roundabout. I don’t mind this at all, if anything it’s a good way to completely string out the peloton with a pinch point that has virtually no chance of causing a high-speed crash. I also like the finish being uphill (it’s a bit harder than it looks on the ever-useless official profile) for the sake of at least some semblance of variety. Oon the flip side, the final straight once again isn’t actually straight…
Laval is the westernmost major town in what was once the County of Maine. Maine is squeezed in between Normandie to the north and the Anjou to the south. With both sides being extremely powerful in the 11th and 12th centuries – each produced an English ruling dynasty during this era – it should come as no surprise that both sought to control Maine, and a succession of wars did indeed see the county change hands repeatedly. It was in this context that the castle of Laval was constructed in the early 11th century. As Laval was immediately made a barony, it became the regional centre of power. As happens so often, a town developed around the castle, and around the time of French annexation in 1204 it had become large enough for city walls to be constructed. It was probably in the century after this that textile manufacturing started to develop here. Laval mainly produced linen, and this would be the main pillar of the local economy until the 20th century.
Like its Norman counterparts, Laval was seized by the English in 1428, but unlike them, occupation would only last a year. In spite of this, the damage was so severe that the town was then rebuilt. There would be more notable military action here, in 1793. In response to the religious policies and the mass mobilisation ordered by the Jacobin government in Paris, a counter-revolutionary uprising erupted in the Vendée (the area south of Nantes, on the Atlantic coast). After an initial string of successes, the rebels were forced to flee across the Loire after a major defeat at Cholet. They then decided to march towards Normandie, in the hopes of receiving English support. They would occupy Laval on three separate occasions in the following two months. This expedition was a complete failure and ended in the annihilation of the rebel army. The Vendée itself was then brutally suppressed, with the civilian death toll in Nantes, Angers and the countryside to the south rivalling that of the concurrent Terror in Paris. Combined with the long string of battles and the outbreak of disease, the total death toll is most commonly estimated at a depressing 200000 people. Smaller-scale insurrections would continue to pop up in western France, including the area around Laval, in the following years.
After the French revolution, linen gradually started to become less profitable, and quite unlike most other French towns of its size, its population actually went into decline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The textile industry was eventually shuttered after the Second World War (during which Laval was bombed by the Allies) and the town reoriented itself towards food processing in particular. Three decades of rapid population growth then gave way to what is now half a century of very slight decline. As the capital of the Mayenne department, it hosts the Boucles de la Mayenne annually, most commonly organising both a prologue and the final stage. The Tour has been here only twice before, the latter occasion being the 2021 time trial that was won in such shocking fashion by Pogacar.
(picture by matthieugiroux at Wikimedia Commons)
What to expect?
This is a bad area for echelons, so a snoozefest is all but certain. As for the sprint, the final hill is basically the new finish of Nokere Koerse plus an additional 500 metres at 2% at the end, and as you may recall Merlier declined to start in that race because he figured it would be too hard for him. In other words, this finish is enough to really tilt the sprint towards the more versatile sprinters.
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