Unpopular opinion: Alpe d'Huez is on the limit, and it wasn't even the best atmosphere at this Tour de France

Einer Rubio hobbles down the metal stairs from the medical truck in Alpe d’Huez and clambers into an ambulance that will take to a helicopter that will take him to hospital in Grenoble in the valley below. In between, he attempts to take a drink from a bottle of water. It’s not easy. His face is covered in bandages, and where you can see bare skin, it’s puffy and swollen. The water is tilted in the general direction of his numb lips and a little of it manages to pass down his throat, the rest spilling onto his t-shirt and onto the tarmac.

A couple of hours previously, the Colombian had crashed into the back of a UAE Team Emirates-XRG car towards the top of professional cycling’s most packed-out climb. A spectator had seemingly stumbled into the road, the UAE car slammed on the brakes, and Rubio slammed into the rear windscreen. His Tour de France is over; he’ll need minor surgery, and it’ll be a little while before he can eat solid food again.

These things can happen on any busy climb, but Alpe d’Huez simply asks for trouble every time it’s included in the Tour de France, and it’s a minor miracle that incidents like this have not been more common in recent years.

It seems like with every new inclusion on the Tour de France route, Alpe d’Huez becomes that touch more chaotic. It has been this way for decades, but Friday’s visit certainly seemed like an escalation compared to previous editions.

The French police closed the road to traffic several days ago, they inserted barriers on Dutch corner, and they posted hundreds of police men and women to the mountainside. The preceding days were greeted with as much trepidation as excitement. “I hope nothing goes wrong,” was Tadej Pogačar’s input just a couple of days ago.

We drove up the climb a few hours ahead of the race, and what was striking was the quietness of the lower slopes compared to the overcrowding higher up. There was a great little party on Beefeater Bend, but otherwise the bottom portion of the climb was underwhelmingly quiet.

Until we reached Dutch corner, which was the cue for a middle-to-upper section of the climb that was complete bedlam. Fans formed tunnels, pounding and shaking our car as we inched our way through. The car was draped with flags, slapped with stickers and splashed with drinks. There was one section where the police were clearing the left-hand lane for traffic, with fans kettled in like sardines in the right-hand lane.

What it seemed to me was happening was that the crowds may have been similar in overall size compared to recent editions, but they were spread out less evenly along the climb.

My colleague in the passenger seat, a veteran journalist of 35 Tours, put it neatly. “I’ve never seen Alpe d’Huez so quiet,” he said after the first few hairpins. “I’ve never seen Alpe d’Huez as mad as this,” he said 5km from the top. Others with even more Tour experience noted how more frenzied, and even unfriendly, it seemed compared to years gone by.

My best guess would be that social media has accelerated the glorification and fetishization of the Alpe d’Huez atmosphere, and more and more people are heading up with the primary focus of seeking out the hot-spots where the music is loudest, and the costumes are wildest.

This creates bottlenecks where there are simply too many fans for the available space. And the amount of alcohol consumed on the mountain – days before the Tour even arrives – is a very real problem. The vast majority of spectators are true fans of the sport and respectful in their support, but this situation creates a tightrope that demands a holding of breath from the race organisers and the local authorities.

After the stage, there were plenty more reactions that suggest we may be reaching a tipping point.

“It was ugly out there,” said Decathlon CMA CGM director Luke Rowe. “Remco [Evenepoel] got blocked and struggled to move at one point, and I saw a Movistar rider at the side of the road covered in blood. So it was really on the limit.

“It’ll be interesting to speak to the lads and see what they thought because from my side, I mean, the amount of people hitting your wing mirrors and like, you’re millimetres away from running people's feet over and stuff. So it was pretty scary.”

Likewise, for many watching on TV, there will have been a fine line between all this being exhilarating to watch and being slightly uncomfortable to watch.

I realise that the entire article so far opens me up to the criticism of being a killjoy – and I’m waiting for all the ‘I bet he’s fun at parties’ wisecracks in the comments below. In my defense, I can only say that I have been to the darts multiple times.

I am all for party atmospheres in sports, and I wouldn’t wish to punch down on any fans. There is a very fine line between an amazing atmosphere and a slightly unsafe one, and if anything I think the responsibility falls on the race organisers and the authorities to ensure adequate conditions for all involved.

We mustn’t forget that sport is nothing without fans and in no sport is that more true than cycling, which weaves its way through the real world and remains, mercifully, free to access. It would be a great shame to start overly-sanitising that and removing that close connection between fans and riders, which is what makes this sport so special. But with safety so far up the pro cycling agenda this year, and some possible fallout coming from this Alpe d’Huez stage, it will be fascinating to see how the powers-that-be handle this in the future.

Le Markstein: a panoramic cycling stadium

For now, I would argue that Alpe d’Huez wasn’t even the best atmosphere at this Tour de France. Let me take you back to the Markstein on stage 14.

I’d never been to the Vosges mountains, but I’d heard they support the Tour pretty well round those parts, and boy did they not disappoint. We drove up the back side of the final climb, the Col du Haag, but we passed hundreds of cyclists as we did so. There must have been thousands more on the race route itself. After half an hour or so in the press room, I wandered out but was hemmed in by what can only be described as a rolling ocean of people walking past, pushing their bikes up the final stretch of gravel onto the grassy hilltop expanses that would give them a panorama of the mountain range and a vantage point of the race below.

Barbecue smoke filled the air, Eurotrash blasted from the hilltop cafe, and picnics were hastily scrambled up with every blast of sudden, torrential rain. But the rain would not spoil this party. The crowds were as thick as I’ve ever seen.

The positioning of the finish line several kilometres beyond the crest of the final climb was actually perfect for this, creating this amphitheatre where the fans flooded every inch of grass on the surrounding hillsides. Whereas the hairpins of Alpe d’Huez squeeze people along the twisting tarmac, the Markstein was a panoramic grassy stadium.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” wrote the typically poetic cycling photographer Jered Gruber alongside a collection of shots from the stage uploaded to his Instagram. “The crowd atop the Col du Haag was a rolling, beautiful, multi-coloured sea rippling across, up, down, and over the mountainside spread about the better half of 360 degrees. It was full. Overflowing.

“It was without question the biggest collection of humans I’ve seen at a bike race. It was stunning. When we rounded the corner out of the trees and into the grassy stadium itself, it made everything fall away. It was just awe. Wonder.”

First of all, thank you, Jered, for expressing what I am finding so difficult after over an hour spent not only driving up Alpe d’Huez on race day, but down it too. Secondly, it was not just us in the media, but the riders themselves. “I have never seen crowds like this,” said Tadej Pogačar, who had ridden Alpe d’Huez before, on the 2022 Tour.

Alpe d’Huez is a carnival, or as one colleague put it, “pure debauchery”. The Markstein was still feverish, but less of a stag do. It felt more bucolic - bags were full of picnics, and for most this was the culmination of a ride or a hike in the countryside. It felt like there were many more bikes. And it certainly felt more family-friendly.

And I’d say that the atmosphere was a more natural, organic one, too. Pogačar skipped away yet again, but Paul Seixas, the great French hope, set about chasing down and then dropping Jonas Vingegaard. It was an electric moment, one of those where the Tour simply comes alive and throbs with meaning and possibility.

What I’m trying to say is that the atmosphere was beating more in tune and in time with the race. On Alpe d’Huez, the race itself feels more incidental to the party.

But maybe I’m just getting old, and maybe there’s a place for both tastes. I’m going on a stag-do in September, and I’m going to the darts in December. But if you ask me if I want to spend a summer’s day watching the Tour de France, I’ll be heading to the Markstein every time.

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