Tour de France director hits back at Uno-X hotel criticism and reveals how hotels are shared out fairly

Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme has hit back at criticism about the quality of the team hotels from Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility) by explaining that all teams are treated equally using a carefully calculated system of hotel allocation.

Halland Johannessen posted videos about the poor quality of his room on social media and suggested he slept under the stars on a terrace due to a lack of air conditioning. Alpecin-Premier Tech and Picnic-PostNL stayed in the same ski resort hotel and apartments and also complained about the poor quality of the hotel and apartments.

UAE Team Emirates-XRG also reportedly slept in a hotel without adequate air conditioning but are sponsored by Eight Sleep, which provides the riders with a special pod system that fits on the bed like a mattress cover and can provide cooling to help them sleep.

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"I wasn't bitten by spiders, but it wasn't pleasant, that's for sure," Alpecin sports director Christoph Roodhooft told Sporza.

"There needs to be a sort of healthy minimum regarding quality, cleanliness, and location. You arrive at a hotel like that, and it is what it is. You can't leave. It was below all standards, but complaining doesn't help."

Prudhomme told French radio channel ICI that ASO books 1,850 hotel beds for each stage and so often struggles to find sufficient quality hotels for the teams, especially in remote parts of France such as the Massif Central.

Halland Johannessen's videos went viral, and he tried to backtrack at the start of stage 10.

"The Tour is an adventure, and we have made even more of it," he told Sporza.

"We enjoyed a night under the starry sky. The hotel was certainly not luxurious, but sleeping outside was a bit better. There were fewer insects and mosquitoes there than in our rooms."

Prudhomme praised Uno-X Mobility as a team but was clearly not amused. "If we want the race to visit beautiful parts of France and have beautiful stages, it means that sometimes there aren't five-star hotels everywhere," Prudhomme told ICI, explaining how the Tour organisers share out team hotels.

"I was asked why we reserve the rooms for the teams. It's because we're the only ones who can guarantee equality amongst the teams at the Tour," he said.

"At the end of the Tour, all the teams will have the same number of hotel stars; they will have the same distance from the hotel to the stage start and from the stage finish to the hotel. In the mountains, all the teams stay at the same altitude. Only the organiser can do that because the teams will always defend their own interests."

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