The courses of the next female and masculine editions of the prestigious cycling event were unveiled on Thursday in Paris.
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The Puy de Dôme will stand up again on the road to the Tour de France in 2023. This is the most symbolic announcement that was made, Thursday, October 27, at the Paris Congress Palace, where the cycling gratin on Route was brought together to discover the layout of the next editions of the Grande Boucle – from 1 er to July 23 for men; From July 23 to 30 for women.
As was the case this summer, the big departure of the female peloton will be given a few hours before the epilogue of the male version. But, this time, it is from Clermont-Ferrand that the runners will start their eight-day journey, which will take them to Béarn, in Pau, where a closing time trial will wait for them. An absent exercise in the previous edition, marking the rebirth of the test after thirty years of absence, and that many of them call for their wishes. Above all, they will tackle a mythical ascent of the Tour: the Col du Tourmalet, whose name is associated with that of the greatest cyclists, like the Italian Fausto Coppi, the Spanish Federico Bahamontes or the Belgian Eddy Merckx.
In their male counterparts, it is another historical rise, that of Puy de Dôme, who was on everyone’s lips on Thursday. The Tour de France 2023, whose departure will be given from Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country, may go through the five mountain ranges of France, with a record of thirty passes, it is 9
From 1952 to 1988, the runners of the Grande Boucle climbed him thirteen times. But since the victory of the Danish Johnny Weltz, thirty-five years ago, the peloton had no longer laid the wheels there. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the race, had expressed, on several occasions, of his desire to see the runners fight again, but the classification of the World Heritage of UNESCO of the Puys-Faille chain of Limagne, Then work related to the construction of a rack train line had delayed its plans.
“There was a paradigm shift, he explained to the France-Presse agency. Before, for us to go somewhere, everything had to pass, including the caravan. Since C ‘East: “Let’s return the mountain to the champions.” But the sine qua non condition is that, in the last kilometers, the last four at Puy de Dôme, there is no one apart from the runners, the organization and a retransmission TV. “These final slopes, whose average is around 12 %, will therefore compete without public, given the narrowness of the premises.
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