Tour de
France.

A Day Well Spent

A Day Following the Tour de France

The Tour de France covers approximately 3,400 kilometers over 21 stages in July. It passes through villages that have one day per year when the entire world is looking at them. It climbs mountain passes that are closed to traffic for hours before the race so that spectators can walk up and claim their patch of tarmac. It ends, every year, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris in a procession that serves as both a victory lap and a farewell to three weeks of the most beautiful sporting spectacle available to a spectator who is willing to stand on the side of a road in France.

Unlike almost every other major sporting event, watching the Tour de France costs nothing. There are no tickets. There are no assigned seats. You drive to a mountain road, park where the gendarmes allow, walk up as far as your legs will take you, and wait. The caravan passes first — a procession of sponsor vehicles throwing free merchandise into the crowd for an hour — and then, with very little warning, 170 cyclists appear traveling at 50 kilometers per hour and are gone in 40 seconds. Those 40 seconds, if you have chosen the right spot at the right moment of the right stage, constitute one of the great experiences available in European sport.

Choosing Your Stage: Where the Race Is Won

The mountain stages are where the Tour is decided and where the spectator experience is most extraordinary. The high Alpine and Pyrenean climbs — Alpe d'Huez, Col du Tourmalet, Col du Galibier, Mont Ventoux — are the stages worth planning around. Each has its own character and its own mythology, and each attracts a crowd that treats the occasion as a combination of pilgrimage and carnival.

Alpe d'Huez is the most famous finish in the Tour and the most reliably spectacular. The 13.8-kilometer climb features 21 hairpin bends, each numbered in reverse from the bottom (21 to 1), each dedicated to a previous stage winner. The crowd on the upper hairpins — particularly bends 7 through 3 — is dense, loud, and occasionally chaotic. The riders pass within touching distance. Some are touched. This is not encouraged but it is a tradition the gendarmes cannot entirely prevent. Arrive the day before the stage. Walk up in the morning. Claim your position on a hairpin. Wait.

Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees is the climb that has appeared in the Tour more than any other and the one that produces the most dramatic race situations. At 2,115 meters, the Tourmalet summit is cold even in July — bring layers regardless of the forecast. The descent into Barèges on the other side is one of the fastest descents in professional cycling and the spectator experience of watching riders descend at 90 kilometers per hour on a road you drove up carefully that morning is its own particular form of astonishment.

Mont Ventoux — the Giant of Provence — stands alone in the French landscape in a way that makes it visible for miles before you reach it. The upper third of the climb above the treeline is pure white limestone, exposed to wind that can make the summit genuinely dangerous and has, historically, changed race outcomes more than the gradient. Tom Simpson died here in 1967 and his memorial, 1.5 kilometers below the summit, is visited by thousands of cyclists and race followers every July. Standing at the memorial as the peloton passes is one of the more solemn and powerful things available to a Tour follower.

The Caravan: One Hour of Organized Chaos

The Tour de France publicity caravan — la caravane publicitaire — precedes the race by approximately 90 minutes and consists of over 160 vehicles representing race sponsors, each decorated to an extreme and staffed by people whose job is to throw branded merchandise into the crowd with maximum enthusiasm. The caravan distributes 15 million items over the course of the Tour: keyrings, hats, snacks, sunglasses, water bottles, inflatable items of various descriptions. Children treat it as Christmas. Adults pretend to be above it and then scramble for the Haribo gummy bears with equal urgency.

The caravan is not the race. It is, however, the warm-up act that makes the waiting feel like celebration rather than patience. By the time the final vehicles have passed and the road falls quiet again, the crowd has been in a particular state of collective excitement for an hour and is ready for what comes next. The sound of the race helicopters overhead is the signal that the riders are close. The gendarmes clear the road. The crowd compresses to the edges. Then the breakaway appears.

The Perfect Stage Day