Tour de France 'comes home' as 2025 route unveiled
The 2025 Tour de France will be raced exclusively in France for the first time since the 2020 Covid edition with the 21 stages including two time-trials, a blockbuster final week in the Alps and a return to the Champs-Elysees finale.
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
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.