The China Mail - Tour de France 'comes home' as 2025 route unveiled

After successive starts outside France in Copenhagen in 2022, Bilbao in 2023 and Florence in 2024, the 2025 Grand Depart is in the northern French city of Lille, with fans expected to flood over the nearby Belgian border.

"We decided to bring the Tour home, it was high time after all the foreign starts," race director Christian Prudhomme said.

Entirely absent from the 2024 route due to the Olympics, the 2025 edition has eight stages in the North and West and ends with eight laps along the cobbles of the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

The Olympics enjoyed a huge success with a long, arduous race around Paris but organisers said it was too soon for the Tour to attempt that.

"We are in talks with the city hall and the police about the possibility of doing that some time," Prudhomme told AFP.

A fierce struggle for the first yellow jersey accorded to the overall race leader will be decided on a 185km race around Lille.

Cross-border Belgian fans can support a potential winner in 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 said.

- D-Day beaches -

The three-week extravaganza visits the sites of the D-Day landings around Dunkirk and Boulogne.

Largely destroyed during the Battle of Normandy in 1944, a time-trial around the city of Caen will pay homage to the fallen on stage five.

Organisers were keen to explain the first week was tough.

"A week in the plains is not the joy ride it was in the old days," Prudhomme said. "We have cut the sprint stages and layed traps everywhere."

The race also makes a rare incursion into Brittany visiting the gothic city of Saint Malo with its giant granite walls.

That stage ends on the short steep climb on the Mur-de-Bretagne where in 2021 Mathieu van der Poel, the grandson of Raymond Poulidor - 12 times on the podium but never a winner or leader of the Tour - avenged the family debt.

"If only he were here," he screamed, punching the tarmac with an unforgettable show of emotion.

"We need stages like this, going back over legendary ground so that children can dream of the Tour as we once did," Prudhomme said.

Wine lovers will spot Chinon on stage 10, and the Rhone Valley on stage 17, but there is no Burgundy, Bordeaux or Champagne on the map at all.

Tradition holds that the Tour de France is won and lost in the Alps and this edition has been stacked with mountains in the third week.

The first mountains come as late as stage 10 in the massive Central on July 14, France's national holiday.

A day off in Toulouse on stage 11 is followed by three blockbuster climb stages in the Pyrenees, then three more in the last week in the Alps with a plethora of legendary Tour mountains on the menu.

Defending champion Tadej Pogacar has proven too hot to handle in stages with a single mountain, but is beatable where there are four or five, especially in the heat.

After being beaten into second twice by Denmark's Jonas Vingegaard, Pogacar towered above the Tour in 2024, winning six stages in a crushing triumph

Evenepoel won the white jersey for best young rider in his first Tour and has promised to show up in 2025 better primed for climbing after focussing on his triumphant Olympics.

Y.Parker--ThChM