Cyclist
Is the Tour de France getting too hard?
From a fan’s point of view, it seems like most Grand Tours are increasingly designed purely for climbers – and therefore GC contenders – rather than sprinters, puncheurs, or rouleurs.
Soon after the 2024 Tour de France route was unveiled, Irish legend Sean Kelly, who won four green jerseys, gave a blunt assessment of modern racing. He told GCN: ‘It’s so difficult, but that’s nothing new.
‘These races now seem to have something against these sprinters and in the latter years the pure sprinters don’t really have much of an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities. One event wants to be better than the other, and that just makes it harder and harder.’
But is this true – and what does it mean for riders, fans, and organisers?
The stats
A map by Le Monde shows a gradual shift, as the Tour has evolved, to taking in more and more mountains.
Across 111 editions, Paris is the most-visited region in the country, but outside the capital the Tour’s biggest hotspots are all mountainous départements. It most commonly ventures to the Pyrenees along the border with Spain, going to the Hautes-Pyrénées 107 times, Pyrénées-Atlantiques 105 times, and Haute-Garonne 103.
Savoie in the Alps is the next most visited, at 98 stops in 111 Tours, followed by 89 passes through Haute-Savoie and 85 through Isère, home of Alpe d’Huez and the Col du Portet.
All six regions feature in the 2024 edition, promising plenty of opportunities for the likes of GC favourites Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar, and polka-dot contenders like Giulio Ciccone or Felix Gall.
Le Monde also notes how the Tour used to be much more of a circuit of France – hence the ‘Grand Boucle’ nickname – whereas now it’s concentrated more in the south and southwest.
From the 1980s onwards the Tour largely moved away from the northwest (minus Brittany and the Vendée) to take in more of the centre – helped by longer transfers between some stages – and, especially in the last twenty five years, focussing on the high mountains.
For the 25 races between 2000 and 2024, the race visited the Pyrenees 22 times, Savoie (the Alps) 24, and the Hautes-Pyrenees every single time.
Breaking down the stats
Last year’s TdF marked the first time the race went through all five French mountain ranges, featuring nearly 56,000m of climbs and a record 30 passes, including featuring the famous Puy de Dôme for the first time in 35 years.
In previous years the race started easier, with a week of flat and minor hilly stages before building up the difficulty, but the 2023 edition wanted its riders to suffer from the start.
Its Grand Départ in Bilbao featured 3,300m of elevation before moving into the Pyrenees earlier than normal. Even Stage 2 featured 3km of hard climbing at 8% up the Jaizkibel, more famous for its inclusion in the Clasica San Sebastian.
The 2024 race is slightly down in terms of elevation – at 52,000m – but that’s still 10,000 more than the 2024 Giro d’Italia, and it packs a formidable punch in other ways too.
The Tours of 2020, 2021 and 2023 all had eight possible sprint opportunities and 2022 had six. 2024 has a maximum of six or seven, and some of those could be derailed by crosswinds and the inclusion of gravel.
The 2024 Tour de France in detail
The 111th Tour follows in the footsteps of the 2023 edition with a tough opening week, but takes things to new heights, kicking off with three hilly days in Italy and heading to France via the Alps.
The opening stage starts as the race means to go on, encompassing 3,600m of elevation gain between Florence and Rimini – the most Stage 1 has ever had.
After a brutal start, the sprinters get their first chance on day three, and even that features three categorised climbs. Their reward for that? Taking on the infamous 2,600m Col du Galibier on day four, marking the highest the Tour has ever gone so early in the race.
Day five and six offer another couple of chances, but after Stage 16 the sprinters may as well all go home, with another three summit finishes and a closing time-trial to go rather than the usual mad dash for glory on the Champs-Elysees. Even that time-trial, ending in Nice, is a hilly one.
In between all that, the race ventures through the Massif Central en route to the Pyrenees, where back-to-back summit finishes at Pla d’Adet and Plateau de Beille await, before returning to the Alps for the triple header of Super Dévoluy, Isola 2000 and La Colmaine.
What will the racing look like?
Five summit finishes in the final eight days of the Tour create the risk of GC contenders keeping their powder dry over the opening two weeks.
The big mountains have been put in the race for maximum drama – but their inclusion risks the race feeling like a procession until we get there. And for the sprinters to even have their chances on the flat, they’ll need to first crawl over the mountains within the time limit. So the sprint stages could be even more cagey than normal as riders seek to conserve their remaining energy until the final push.
Mark Cavendish was plain after the route presentation, telling media, ‘It might be the hardest route I’ve ever seen at the Tour de France. I’m actually in a bit of shock.’
Gravel is also set to feature in this year’s Tour, which has had some people – notably Visma-Lease a Bike boss Richard Plugge – up in arms. There does seem to be an element of aiming for as much shock factor as possible in the race design.
What’s behind the change?
A major factor in the evolution of race design is the people in charge. Christian Prudhomme, general director, and Thierry Gouvenou, race director, have led the Tour de France since 2007. In its early days they made a concerted effort to spice up what they felt had become a generic, bland race – but some feel that spirit of innovation has gone too far.
Clearly Sean Kelly is one of them, telling GCN, ‘The organisers of these three Grand Tours, and the other races as well, just want to find these stupid, crazy, steep climbs. From a sprinter’s point of view it’s not nice. It’s horrible.’
The shift towards backloaded mountainous stage races is happening elsewhere, too. This year’s Tour of Britain started with five repetitive flat stages – most won by Jumbo-Visma’s Olav Kooij – before cramming all its mountains into the final two days. It meant that no real GC action happened until the second half of the race. Even the commentators found it unbearable – David Millar called it ‘Groundhog Day’.
And 2024’s Vuelta a España will go even further than the Tour, featuring a meagre one fully flat stage.
Tour designers are restricted in route design in some ways: certain areas will have more money to throw at a race to get it to show off their locale, and every road race is at its core a commercial enterprise.
Making money is the Tour’s priority and the idea goes that drama-filled mountain stages, where top riders either crumble or soar to victory, are better for fans. Cast your mind back to Pogačar’s ‘I’m gone, I’m dead’ message to his team radio as he cracked on the Col de la Loze last year, as Vingegaard finally broke his rival and cemented his second TdF crown, and it seems hard to argue that point.
But do sprint stages actually generate lower viewing figures, and is there actually less drama now? To some extent all types of parcours feature teams conserving their energy and controlling events for the majority of the race, and that’s unlikely to be different given the number of summit finishes this year.
One of the biggest stories of both the 2023 and 2024 editions is Cavendish’s chance to break the record for all-time Tour stage victories – a chance that was abruptly cut short by crashing out on Stage 8 last year.
Given the headlines and viewing figures the Cav #35 storyline will inevitably generate this time around, at his last-ever, last-ditch effort to claim the record, it would make sense for the 2024 race to be a little more balanced between GC stages and sprint opportunities – both for fans, TV viewing figures, and advertisers.
What does this mean for the future?
Given the general trend for Tours to get tougher and tougher each year, which Prudhomme and Gouvenou seem pretty attached to, it doesn’t seem likely that the mountainous, backloaded races of recent times are going anywhere.
But it’s possible some changes may have to be made. In the first place, the type of rider taking on Grand Tours may change, as the Manx Missile-style sprinter may find it too difficult to get over the mountains in order to be competitive on the flat. With the Tour increasingly unfriendly to anyone who isn’t a strong climber, teams may have to further shake up their squad selection in future, with a knock on effect on signings and transfers.
On a darker note, Kelly suggested that the spectre of doping may rear its head again. He said, ‘From a UCI point of view, maybe they need to restrict the amount of metres climbed in the first few days of a Tour because, if not, are we not going down the danger of pushing riders to the limit and doing bad things again?’
It goes without saying that the UCI and ASO will want to avoid that, but this year’s Tour might also mark the start of a more experimental phase of route design. Stage 9 includes 14 gravel sectors, a growing feature in modern road races following the success of Strade Bianche, and its final stage avoids the usual processional finish in Paris due to the upcoming Olympics.
Instead, the yellow jersey battle might go right down to the wire as the race finishes with an individual time-trial for the first time since Greg LeMond’s legendary victory in 1989 – surely inspired by the sight of Vingegaard extending his lead over Pogačar by more than a minute and a half last year.
Ironically, the first stage of the partially announced 2025 edition will be a sprint stage in Lille, so fans might get a return to more old-school racing after next summer. A chance for Cavendish to postpone retirement again if doesn’t break the record in 2024, perhaps?
And of course, the Tour used to be a lot harder – although you have to go back to the early 1900s to find races so difficult riders cheated by taking the train instead of completing a whole stage. At least we’ve moved on from those days.
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