The director of the Tour de France cycling race, Christian Prudhomme, unveiled the men's 2025 race route and stages during the official presentation of both the men's and women's 2025 editions of the Tour de France in Paris on Tuesday. — AFP
For the first time since the 2020 Covid edition, the 2025 Tour de France will be raced exclusively within France. The 21 stages include two time-trials, a climactic final week in the Alps, and a return to the iconic Champs-Elysees finale. Following successive starts outside France in Copenhagen (2022), Bilbao (2023), and Florence (2024), the 2025 Grand Depart will be in the northern French city of Lille, drawing fans from across the nearby Belgian border.
"We decided to bring the Tour home; it was high time after all the foreign starts," said race director Christian Prudhomme. The 2025 edition, which was entirely absent from the 2024 route due to the Olympics, features eight stages in the North and West, culminating in eight laps along the cobbles of the Champs-Elysees in Paris. While the Olympics saw a successful, arduous race around Paris, organizers believe it's too soon for the Tour to attempt a similar feat.
A fierce battle for the first yellow jersey, awarded to the overall race leader, will be decided on an 185km race around Lille. Belgian fans, crossing the border, can cheer on potential winner and double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who finished third in the 2024 Tour. "Evenepoel proved last year he is also a man of the Tour, and we expect him to be active this year too," Prudhomme noted.
The three-week race visits the sites of the D-Day landings around Dunkirk and Boulogne. A time-trial around the city of Caen, largely destroyed during the Battle of Normandy in 1944, will honor the fallen on stage five. Organizers emphasized that the first week is challenging. "A week in the plains is not the joy ride it was in the old days; we have cut the sprint stages and laid traps everywhere," Prudhomme explained.
The race also ventures into Brittany, visiting the Gothic city of Saint Malo with its massive granite walls. The stage ends on the short, steep climb of the Mur-de-Bretagne, where Mathieu van der Poel, grandson of Raymond Poulidor, avenged the family's Tour legacy in 2021. "We need stages like this, revisiting legendary ground, so that children can dream of the Tour as we once did," Prudhomme said.
Wine enthusiasts will find Chinon on stage 10 and the Rhone Valley on stage 17, but Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Champagne are notably absent. Tradition dictates that the Tour de France is won and lost in the Alps, and this edition is packed with mountains in the third week. The first mountains appear as late as stage 10 in the Central Massif on July 14, France's national holiday. A rest day in Toulouse on stage 11 is followed by three intense climb stages in the Pyrenees, then three more in the last week in the Alps, featuring numerous legendary Tour mountains.
Defending champion Tadej Pogacar has proven unbeatable in stages with a single mountain but is vulnerable where there are four or five, especially in the heat. After being runner-up twice to Denmark's Jonas Vingegaard, Pogacar dominated the 2024 Tour, winning six stages in a crushing victory. Evenepoel won the white jersey for best young rider in his first Tour and promises to be better prepared for climbing in 2025 after focusing on his Olympic success.
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