2016 Tour de France route revealed
Published 11:56 am Tuesday, October 20, 2015
PARIS — The route for next year’s Tour de France should suit the all-around riding skills of defending champion Chris Froome.
Two individual time trials and 28 tough climbs will be on the schedule in July, organizers announced Tuesday.
The 3,519-kilometer (2,186-mile) trek will scale the Pyrenees before the Alps, just as the Tour did this year, again going counter-clockwise around France. That breaks with tradition, because generally the Tour alternates between clockwise and counter-clockwise.
Froome, the British rider who won in 2013 and ‘15, is a contender both on climbs and in individual time trials, making him an early favorite for 2016.
An ascent of Mont Ventoux in Provence on Bastille Day on July 14 will test the best climbers. Froome was the stage winner when the Tour last scaled its barren, 1,909-meter (6,263-foot) peak in 2013.
The Mont-Saint-Michel, a World Heritage Benedictine abbey perched on a rock off the Normandy coast, will provide a picture-postcard start for the race. The first stage ends at Utah Beach, used for the 1944 D-Day landings.
The Tour will swing briefly through the bumpy Massif Central before hitting even bigger mountains in the Pyrenees. In the Alps, which will decide the final placings before the July 24 finish in Paris, the Tour will loop past Mont Blanc, western Europe’s highest peak.
“It’s going to be extraordinary,” Tour director Christian Prudhomme said.
