In the not so distant past, Tour de France routes seemed to follow a set template, with a flat opening week followed by a long time trial and two blocks of mountains stages, before a late stage against the clock wrapped things up neatly before the final promenade in Paris. Year on year, the towns on the road book changed but the tenor of the race remained the same.
Since Christian Prudhomme took over as race director 10 years ago, however, the Tour de France has increasingly railed against such predictability. In the Indurain and Armstrong years, save for crashes or incident, the battle for the yellow jersey often felt limited to just a few set-piece mountain stages or time trials. In the modern Tour, by contrast, the aim of the route planners seems to be to extend the GC battle across almost every day of the three weeks.
That doesn’t always materialise, of course – witness the détente that reigned during the flat stages in week two this year – but the 2018 Tour de France route, presented in Paris on Tuesday, continues the recent trend of blending traditional stages with some striking innovations in a bid to keep the overall contenders guessing.
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There are potential perils on just about every stage of the 2018 Tour, but at this early juncture, these five days in particular stand out.
Stage 9, July 15: Arras Citadelle – Roubaix, 154km
“I don’t understand why they’ve put in the cobbles,” Eusebio Unzue lamented after the lights went up in the Palais des Congrès on Tuesday morning.
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