The Tour de France may have broken with tradition this year by shifting its grand finale to Nice, but the usual Champs-Élysées circuit looks set to remain in place when the final stage returns to Paris in 2025, despite the possibilities suggested by the Olympic Games road race circuit.
The dramatic road races at the Paris 2024 Olympics took in the climb of Montmartre before finishing with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. While the Tour’s technical director Thierry Gouvenou expressed admiration for the course, he explained why it was unlikely to be replicated at his race in the future, starting with the width of the roads.
“The Tour de France peloton is twice as big as it was at the Olympics, so we'd have to find much bigger streets than those used at the weekend to map out a new circuit," Gouvenou told L’Équipe. “Towards Montmartre, they went through some very narrow places, real bottlenecks. In some places, if they needed to provide mechanical service to riders at the back of the bunch, they’d barely have been able to open the car doors. It worked yesterday here, but it wouldn't be acceptable during the Tour.”
Gouvenou added that the spate of punctures and crashes that afflicted the road races were not entirely unexpected given the Tour peloton’s annual experience on the streets of Paris.
“That didn't surprise me. Every year we have more mechanical problems during the 60km we cover in Paris than on the rest of the Tour de France," Gouvenou said. “And it would have been even worse if the weather hadn't been good: the slightest drop of water turns the streets of Paris into an ice rink, as we saw in the time trial.”
Indeed, Gouvenou downplayed the prospect of any deviation from the Tour’s familiar Champs-Élysées circuit, noting that it allowed the race to enter the heart of Paris without an undue impact on the daily life of the city.
“You would need very strong political will to put all that in place,” Gouvenou said. “When we do the Champs-Élysées circuit, we barely encircle any residents, apart from the unknown soldier. If we went to Montmartre, that would have an enormous impact on the inhabitants.”
Groupama-FDJ manager Marc Madiot, meanwhile, noted that the dynamic of the final stage of the Tour meant that tackling the Montmartre circuit rather than the Champs-Élysées would not make for a more dramatic conclusion to the Tour.
“It is a delusion to think that we can have the same scenario on a final stage of the Tour de France,” Madiot told L’Équipe. “It would be a parade, as is always the case before the Champs.”
