Why The Tour de France Route Is Different Every Single Year
Defector
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As I spend the early part of the summer talking about the Tour de France with normal people (read: non-cycling fans), there's one thing that catches almost everyone off-guard.
I will outline the route and they'll say something like "What do you mean it starts in Barcelona?," as they adopt an expression that I imagine conveys a skepticism about whether I know Barcelona is not in France or that Louis XIV evacuated Catalonia following 1697's Peace of Ryswick.
To those who haven't paid the closest attention, learning that "Tour" is subjective and "de France" is not entirely accurate is a useful entrypoint into learning about the joyful quirks of the world's biggest bike race.
It will dawn on them that the route changes every year; as it turns out, figuring out why the organizers craft different races year after year will teach you a ton about the sport.
It wasn't always like this.
Riders in the Tour's earliest days circumscribed a hexagon within the edges of France's borders, beginning and ending in Paris.
The Tour is still known as the Grand Boucle, or Big Loop, an appellation that used to be literal.
Most of the early Tours were raced clockwise, and went the other way for the first time in 1913, a decade after the first Tour.
Innovations were sparse and slow, and though the route was tweaked every year, its shape and rhythm was mostly the same.
It wasn't until 1960 that organizers had a stage start in a different city than where the previous one ended, with riders taking the train south from Bordeaux to Mont de Marsan.
From that point, the Loop began slowly distending, its shape becoming increasingly abstract.