Tour Climbs: The complete guide to every mountain stage on the Tour de France. Chris Sidwells
of France when Goddet used to wear his tropical gear of pith helmet, shorts, long socks and a Safari shirt. Goddet also had a shrewd assistant called Felix Levitan, who looked after the commercial side of the race. Between them they ruled with a rod of iron, and despite there being official referees and judges on the race, Goddet and Levitan’s word on anything was final.
Going global
An Australian team raced in the Tour de France way back in 1928, but up until the mid-1950s Tour competitors were almost exclusively from mainland Europe. Then a British team, sponsored by a bike manufacturer called Hercules, raced in the 1955 event. Only two of their riders, Brian Robinson and Tony Hoar, finished, but Robinson graduated into mainstream European pro racing and won stages in the 1958 and 1959 Tours.
More Britons followed Robinson. Tom Simpson wore the leader’s Yellow Jersey in 1962, and Barry Hoban won eight Tour stages during his long pro career. Robert Millar then became the Britain’s most successful Tour de France rider when he finished fourth overall and won the King of the Mountains competition in 1984.
While this was going on Australians, Irish, Americans and Canadians continued to swell the English-speaking presence on the race. Other nations joined in too, most notably the Colombians and Scandinavians began to write themselves into Tour history. The Tour de France was going global.
Its fame and appeal exploded in 1986 when an American Greg Lemond won the Tour. His victory was followed by Stephen Roche from Ireland in 1987. New interest in the race from all over the world meant a flood of new sponsors. Major names like Coca Cola wanted a piece of the Tour. An American, Lance Armstrong set a record in 2005 with seven consecutive victories in the Tour, and a Frenchman hasn’t won since 1985.
Twenty-first century Tour
Today the Tour de France is huge. London paid £1.5 million to host the start of the race in 2007, but got far more than that back from the visitors who came to watch. The prize list for the race totals €3 million, with €400,000 euros going to the winner. Not that he sees any of it. Traditionally he splits it among his team, because the winner of the Tour de France automatically becomes the highest earner in the sport. Lance Armstrong is reputed to have earned $17 million in product endorsements alone during 2005.
The Tour de France has its own motorcycle police force and a travelling bank, the only one allowed by law to open on the nation’s Bastille Day holiday. Each year there are 2300 accredited journalists on the race, 1100 technicians and chauffeurs, many of them ex-competitors who drive race officials and guests on the race. On top of that 1500 vehicles accompany the riders on the road in the form of a publicity cavalcade that companies pay dearly to be part of. Another 4500 support staff work on the Tour, either in race routing, hospitality or assembling and taking down the temporary Tour village that goes from town to town between the stages.
At the heart of all this activity are the riders. As many as 200 of the world’s best pro road racers start the Tour, although every year there are a good few that don’t make it through to the finish. Like the race, the riders’ personal statistics are prodigious. For example, it’s reckoned that a competitor will burn around 123,000 calories if he gets through to the end of the race. He will make getting on for 500,000 pedal revolutions, wear out three bicycle chains, and every year the whole field gets through 700 ultra-light racing tyres.
How it works
The Tour de France is big, and it’s getting bigger with a prosperous and exciting future ahead of it, but it is a race that is firmly rooted in tradition. It has always been what in cycling is called a stage race. That is a race decided on total time to complete the whole course, but with the course broken up into individual stages. The rider who completes the whole course in the least time is the overall winner, and at any given point after the first stage the race has an overall leader who wears the yellow jersey.
Most of the stages are straightforward races. They are referred to as road stages, where all the riders start together and the first over the line wins the stage. A few stages are time trials; riders start individually at intervals and the one who covers the course on his own in the fastest time wins the stage. Team time trails work on the same principle, but the individual teams complete the course together and their times are added to each team member’s overall time for the race.
The Alpe d’Huez all-day Tour party © Luc Claessen
Soon after the first editions were run, the Tour de France settled into a pattern that is preserved today. It usually occupies the first three weeks of July, which covers the time that French people traditionally take their summer holidays. Since 1967 it has started with a short prologue time trial, which provides some order for the first few stages. The prologue winner wears the yellow jersey on the first road stage.
Most years see the first few stages run off over flat to undulating countryside, giving riders who don’t shine in the mountains the chance for some glory. A longish time trial comes after this first phase, and then the mountains. To win the Tour de France a rider must be good at the time trials, but he must also excel in the mountains. He certainly can’t be a specialist in one to the exclusion of the other, although many Tour winners have leant towards one or other speciality.
Since they were first visited, the Alps and Pyrenees have been included in every race and the Tour tries to visit the Vosges and Massif Central whenever it can. The race always finishes in Paris, and the others stage towns and cities are decided by geography and by the various municipalities pitching to be hosts. Many places, including towns and cities in neighbouring countries, want to be visited by the Tour. Each year the organisers have a notional idea of where they would like to go, what climbs they would like to include, then they look at who wants the race and come up with a route.
The first long time trial and the first day in the mountains are when the Tour de France begins to take shape each year. The riders and pundits say that while you cannot tell who will win in Paris after the first mountain stage, you can always tell who will not. A number of favourites invariably fall out of the running on this crucial day.
The importance of mountain climbs
Why should this be? Why are mountain climbs so important in shaping the outcome of the Tour de France? Part of the reason is to do with wind resistance. As a cyclist’s speed increases linearly, the air resistance that cyclist has to overcome increases exponentially. So bike racers have to overcome far more air resistance to increase their speed by one mile per hour when travelling at 25 mph than they do when travelling at 10 mph. This means that when they are travelling fairly fast, on a flat stage for example, the riders find it very difficult to break away from each other. The whole field can slipstream each other, saving energy, and will often finish virtually together.
Going uphill though, involves a different set of physics. It’s the force of gravity rather than air resistance that has to be overcome. No cyclist can travel faster uphill than on the flat, so the reduced speeds mean that air resistance and slipstreaming have less of an effect when climbing. In the mountains a rider has to fight against his own weight, so the mountains favour riders with the highest power to weight ratio.
But that isn’t the whole story. Cycling is a complicated sport, and long stage races like the Tour de France are its most complicated arena. A good mountain climber might have a phenomenally high power to weight ratio, but that could be because he is incredibly light and his absolute power is quite low, which is a limiting factor in a time trial. So although a Tour de France winner must excel in the mountains, and climbing specialists have won the race, he must still be able to ride a fair time trial. In fact, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of Tour winners; time trial specialists who can limit their losses in the mountains, and climbers who can do the same in a time trial.
There are also differences in the way