Already well-rinsed, the Tour de France peloton tackles the first of the four Alpine stages on Saturday, the start of an orgy of passes to decide between Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar, the two big favorites for the final victory. Joux-Plane, Forclaz, Col de la Loze, Côte de Domancy… so many high places of the Grande Boucle that the runners tell off on their rosary in a mixture of excitement and fear.
The route of the 14th stage
Credit: official Tour de France website
With impatience for some like Pogacar and Vingegaard who stand in nine seconds in the general classification. This is the anxiety for most riders who have already sweated a lot in this “fast and furious” Tour de France. They scrapped in the hills of the Spanish Basque Country. Made the guerrilla in the Pyrenees. Suffocated in the Puy-de-Dôme and the Grand Colombier. And battled as rarely around the volcanoes of Auvergne and in the Beaujolais vineyard. “All the way from start to finish”, sums up the French runner Victor Lafay. But the hardest part has only just begun.
From Saturday, the slope will rise again for the first chapter of a high altitude novel. By Wednesday evening, the riders will be struggling with fifteen listed climbs, including eight in the first category and two out of category. “The alpine menu hasn’t been this hard for a while. It’s going to be more decisive than last year”, projects David Gaudu who hopes to shine on this ground. The Col de Cou, the unprecedented Col du Feu, the Col de la Ramaz and Joux-Plane are on the program on Saturday between Annemasse and Morzine.
The 17th step? “Monstrous”
“It goes up from the start and in the end, we will have to chain the Col de la Ramaz and Joux-Plane. lose everything in the hyper technical descent to Morzine”, explains Thierry Gouvenou, the architect of the course. Sunday, place at the passes of Forclaz, Croix Fry, Aravis and Amerands, before arriving at the summit in Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc, where Romain Bardet had won in 2016.
After a day of rest, the adventure continues on Tuesday with the only time trial on the program this year, a hill climb, small format (22.4 km) but extremely demanding, with the Domancy coast (2.5 km at 9.4%) that Bernard Hinault had transformed into a cauldron during his victory at the World Championships in 1980. “It’s a super hard and potentially decisive time for the final victory”, predicts the Australian Jai Hindley, third to the general.
And, to top it off, there is still the queen stage on Wednesday. An authentic torture: 5,100 meters of elevation gain, the ascent of the terrible Col de la Loze, roof (2,304 m) of this 110th edition after 28 km of climbing, before a vertiginous dive on Courchevel to finish uphill at the altiport on an 18% slope. “A monstrous step”, warns Jai Hindley.
Heat
For Sepp Kuss, altitude sherpa of Vingegaard, no doubt: “the Alps have everything to be the justice of the peace” of the Tour. “Jonas and Tadej have drawn so far but with the accumulated fatigue and several successive mountain stages, another race begins. And we arrive on the ground that Jonas loves the most”, assures the American. In fact, Vingegaard keeps repeating that long climbs at high altitude are the ones that suit him best, reinforced by his experience last year in the sublime Granon stage where he cracked Pogacar, before winning his first Tour de France in Paris.
But his Slovenian rival swore that he would not be caught there. The double winner in 2020 and 2021, who excels in a more explosive register, claims to have progressed in long climbs and the management of high heat, considered one of his weak points. The next few days in the Alps, where high temperatures are expected, should give him the opportunity to prove it. And if ever the Alps cannot decide between the two ogres, there will still be the Vosges on the eve of the arrival in Paris in this Tour de France 2023 for mountaineers.