“Why won’t the Tour end in Paris in 2024?
We are all very happy that the Olympic Games are taking place in France and in Paris. It’s great for everyone, French sport and beyond. But it was completely impossible to finish the Tour in Paris
, the police and gendarmerie forces will have enough work not to add to it. There is a form of evidence, of common sense. The Côte d’Azur will offer us an exceptional setting from an aesthetic point of view, the place best known by foreigners in France after Paris. Starting from Nice and its metropolis, we will use this completely different ground throughout the weekend, it will allow us to offer a final fireworks display which will be great.
What will the program be? We’re going to finish with an individual time trial on Sunday, the mileage of which we still don’t know, a first for thirty-five years and the famous Champs-Élysées time trial, those eight seconds between Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon (the American won the 1989 Tour on the last day ahead of the Frenchman). We know that the times can be decisive at the end of the Tour, there is no need to go back very far with the Planche des Belles Filles (Tadej Pogacar had overthrown Primoz Roglic in 2020) but it was the penultimate day. And it’s chance, but the Tour arrives on July 21, Belgian national holiday. It will end with a stopwatch. So. (He pauses) I have already said that the current world champion will be welcome whenever he wishes. This is not a call to (Remco) Evenepoel but things are going pretty well
(smile).
And before this last time trial?
We will do a last weekend entirely focused on “sportingly convincing” grounds, as Jean-Marie Leblanc says. We know Nice well thanks to Paris-Nice, which offers a Hitchcock-style final every year. Last March, there was more of a gap than the last times, but when Simon Yates set off on the Chemin du Vinaigrier, the last variant of the Col d’Èze, if Van Aert had not been there to help Roglic, we would have changed leaders on the last day.
Were there other candidates than Nice? Another very large French city approached me, the mayor told me that he dreamed of that. But we didn’t go any further. Nice has a history, appears in the Tour from 1906, the unforgettable Grand Départ of 1981 where Bernard Hinault swapped his world champion jersey for the yellow jersey(prologue winner)