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Past and future 2000 Tour de France grounded in tradition
Posted: Thursday October 21, 1999 01:59 PM
PARIS, France (Reuters) -- Oddly enough for a race starting from the futuristic theme park of Le Futuroscope, the 2000 Tour de France will look to the past. The race itinerary unveiled on Thursday will bring last year's winner Lance Armstrong and his rivals back to a historic finish at Le Mont Ventoux, the grueling climb on which Tom Simpson of Britain died in 1967. The last time a Tour stage finished up the mountain dubbed "the giant of Provence" was in 1987 when Frenchman Jean-Francois Bernard won an individual time-trial. The climb is so demanding -- the heat is usually intense and the landscape arid -- that there have been only five stage finishes there in almost 100 years of Tour history. The list of winners at Le Mont Ventoux speaks for itself. Before Bernard, Luxembourg's Charly Gaul, one of the best climbers in history, won in 1958, followed by French favorite Raymond Poulidor in 1965, Belgian Eddy Merckx, the best rider ever, in 1970 and double Tour winner Bernard Thevenet in 1972. For the first time in five years the Tour will include a team time-trial, between Nantes and St. Nazaire on July 4. The decision to bring it back points to a wish by the organizers to favor all-round riders in this 3,640-kilometer race after two Tours perhaps a little more designed for climbers. Solid, powerful riders are required to win a team time-trial, whereas mountain specialists need a squad of diminutive climbers to help them in the ascents. However, the organizers have decided to stage just one long individual time-trial on July 21, which is the only good news for climbers. Apart from Le Ventoux the route looks reasonably lenient, without some of the classic mountain finishes, such as L'Alpe d'Huez. This year the Alps, on the last week of the Tour, should prove more decisive than the Pyrenees, where there will be only one high-altitude finish at Lourdes-Hautacam on July 10. Climbs to the ski resorts of Courchevel and Morzine are not among the most impressive in the French Alps, especially as the riders will have one of two rest days between those two main Alpine stages. The Tour stopped in both resorts in 1997, the year German Jan Ullrich won in Paris. The decisive individual time-trial of the race will start in Freiburg, in Germany, and end in Mulhouse, on the other side of the border, on July 21. That appears to indicate that, in the minds of the organizers, Ullrich, the recent time-trial world champion and Tour of Spain winner, will be the man to beat. The start in Freiburg is only a few kilometers from Ullrich's home.
Copyright 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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