The Tour de France heads for a once-in-a-lifetime Riviera curtain call
Summary
With Paris preparing for the Summer Olympics, the world’s most famous bike rice wraps up on the Côté d’Azur—which much of the peloton calls home.EMBRUN, France—By now, Tadej Pogacar has memorized every twist and turn of the Col d’Eze, the winding road that rises from behind the port of Nice to the hills above Monaco. It’s where he goes on coffee rides, where he flies past unsuspecting amateurs, and where he trains to win the Tour de France.
The two-time champion is such a fixture on the Col d’Eze that cyclists in the cafés below trade Pogacar sightings like celebrity-spotters in the bars of swanky hotels.
That’s because the 6-mile mountain pass is practically Pogacar’s driveway. And this weekend, Eze and a handful of other climbs on the Côte d’Azur will decide the world’s most famous bike race. For the first time in its 121-year history, the Tour will substitute the road to Paris with a pair of brutal Riviera stages on Friday and Saturday, followed by a Sunday time trial that ends in Nice.
“Afterward," Pogacar said, “I can just get on my bike, ride home and go to sleep."
Pogacar, who lives just up the coast in Monaco, won’t be the only one making the short commute back. The Riviera happens to be one of the world’s leading hot spots for professional cyclists—along with art dealers, oligarchs, and tax exiles. As soon as the Tour ends, dozens of riders will scatter to points between Nice and Monaco and return to their own beds for the first time in over a month.
Under normal circumstances, the race would finish in Paris, where the Tour has concluded every year since the first edition in 1903. But with the French capital scrambling to prepare for the Summer Olympics, which begin on July 26, shutting down major roads and mobilizing security for the peloton to race on the Champs-Elysées, became unworkable. Instead, the Tour fell back on familiar terrain. Organizers kicked off the race on the Côte d’Azur in 2020 and visit the area every March with another event called Paris-Nice.
“It became pretty clear early on that Nice was the solution," said Thierry Gouvenou, who is in charge of designing the Tour de France course every year. “We know it so well and it just gives us so much variety."
That’s one reason riders have flocked to the Riviera for over 20 years. They are seduced by sunshine, the challenging mix of training roads and, for some, the tax benefits of living in Monaco. In a peloton full of copycats, it only took a handful of riders such as Lance Armstrong moving to Nice in the 1990s to start the trend.
“One person goes there, then another follows, and that’s how it starts," says Greg LeMond, who won the Tour three times between 1986 and 1990. “Plus, riders are making a lot more money now."
Over the course of three days, the Tour will have six of its hardest climbs, a mountaintop finish at the Isola 2000 ski resort, a hair-raising descent off the Col de Turini, and a postcard ending along the pebble beaches of the Promenade des Anglais. But everything that makes the Côte d’Azur one of the dreamiest summer spots in Europe also makes it one of the toughest places to ride a bike when you’ve been racing through France for three weeks.
“It’s going to be super-hot and humid," Pogacar said. “I know the conditions of July and August well and I think they’re terrible."
By scheduling a leg-melting time-trial for the final day of the race instead of the usual ceremonial ride onto the Champs-Elysées, organizers hoped to inject some late drama into this year’s Tour. (The only competitive intrigue of the traditional Paris stage is for the sprint specialists.) The dream was to replicate the thrilling finale of the 1989 Tour, a Stage-21 time-trial into Paris that saw American Greg LeMond edge out France’s Laurent Fignon by just 8 seconds. It remains the closest overall margin of victory in the race’s 121-year history.
“They’re really smart to have it," LeMond says, “because it does bring it to the very end."
Or at least, it was supposed to. By building a cushion of more than 3 minutes over defending champion Jonas Vingegaard, Pogacar hasn’t quite played ball. Still, Vingegaard and his Visma-Lease a Bike team are expected to try one more major push to close the gap on Friday in the hopes of reeling Pogacar back into striking distance for Sunday.
If they fail, then Pogacar will take the race for the third time in his career in the closest thing a Slovenian rider could ever have to a home victory in the Tour de France.
“I sometimes go for an easy ride to Nice and back and you could see they already had a Tour atmosphere, even 5 months ago," Pogacar said. “You feel lucky to be there."
