A Sneak Peek at the 2025 Tour de France

And a milestone for the newsletter

Welcome to the 100th edition of the Wheelysports cycling newsletter, or at least that’s what Substack’s dashboard tells me. I wish I’d known that before I opened up the site to write on Monday evening. I would’ve baked a cake or something.

When I started this newsletter a year ago, I hoped it would grow into some kind of sustainable side hustle, though I had no idea what the appetite would be for this kind of cycling coverage, or how to publicize it,¹ or even necessarily what “this kind of cycling coverage” would be. All I knew was what I told myself at the beginning: I’d publish every Tuesday and Friday for at least one year, and I’d figure things out from there.

I’m proud to say I’ve never missed a volume of this newsletter. I learned way back in my early days as a blogger that if you only write when you feel inspiration that inspiration is going to get harder and harder to find. And in order to grow an audience, you have to feed the audience. If people can’t depend on you to give them something to read, they’ll stop checking.

With that said, the “figuring things out from there” part is still in the works. There will probably be at least some noticeable differences in this newsletter in Season 2, but for the most part I’ve enjoyed doing this. And it seems like, for the most part, you’ve enjoyed reading it. Growth has been slower than I’d like, but the numbers have always gone in the right direction. Unsubscribes, especially paid unsubscribes, have been vanishingly rare.²

All of this is to say that if you want to influence the direction of this newsletter, now is your chance. My guiding editorial principle is to write about what interests me, but if you want something different in terms of format or content—I might, might be willing to learn a damn thing about cyclocross if enough people want that—I’m absolutely open to suggestions.

Finally, thank you for clicking and following and reading. I had hoped that there were people out there who were as fascinated by this weird European sport as I was, and I was right. And we’re making more of them every week.

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So with that said, let’s finally take a quick look at the 2025 Tour de France route, which was actually announced a week ago.³ But then Demi Vollering pretended to play the piano, and I got mad about it, and it ended up eating up all of last week.

Anyway, regardez:

I guess it’s not photo credit. Map Credit(?): Amaury Sport Organisation

Yup, that’s a map of France, all right.

I won’t do a full stage-by-stage breakdown 1) because the specific route profiles haven’t all been published yet and 2) then I’ll have nothing to write about next June. But I’ll give you the highlights.

First of all, this Tour will be held entirely in mainland France. Which feels like an odd thing to make a big deal about, given that this is, after all, the Tour de France. But the grand départ has turned into one of those internationally attractive sporting events that local tourism boards will bid on, and ASO is all too happy to spread the start of the race to Denmark or the U.K. or Belgium in the name of drumming up a little extra cash publicity.

On a more mundane note, a lot of the big mountains in France make up international borders, as mountains and rivers are wont to do. So in a lot of cases, if you go up a big enough hill in France, you might come down the other side in Spain or Italy or Switzerland. So it’s not only common for the Tour de France to stray outside the nation of its birth, it’s vanishingly rare that a Tour de France colors entirely within the lines on the map.

The only 21st century exceptions that I could find were 2003, when ASO lined up an all-French course to celebrate the race’s centenary, and 2020, when the pandemic restricted international travel. Also in 2013, the race was contested entirely on French soil, but it included an opening-weekend boat trip to Corsica.⁴

As far as the race itself, the GC action is going to be even more backloaded than usual. We’ve got plenty of hills in the first week, including a finish at the Mûr-de-Bretagne on Stage 7 that I’m pretty stoked for, but apart from a flat time trial on Stage 6, we’ll be talking about gains or losses in a matter of seconds.

In the last decade, ASO—bored of Chris Froome and Team Sky winning every year—seemed to build the course with the intention of disadvantaging the heavy favorite. I don’t think this was out of any particular animus against Froome or Sky specifically; we all just think blowouts are boring.

As unsuccessful as those Froome-proofing efforts were⁵, I think it’s even less possible to do that to Tadej Pogačar, who’ll crush everyone on hills big and little, and hang with the best time trialists on any terrain. Even this past year, when Pogačar’s grueling schedule gave him every incentive to take his foot off the gas, he hunted stage wins like a shark, taking 12 across two grand tours.

For that reason I find it unlikely that Pogačar will sit back and let someone else enjoy a fluky week in yellow, but he won’t be under any severe pressure to assert himself in the GC battle until after the first rest day, halfway through the race.

The stages are pretty short for the most part; only two over 200 kilometers. (The 2024 course had four stages of that length, plus two others of exactly 199 kilometers.) But the hill stages are numerous, and the second half of the race is brutal.

After a 2024 race that was a little light on the big-name mountains, in 2025, the Tour is hitting Mont Ventoux⁶, the Hautacam, the hulking 2,300 meter Col de la Loze, and what will probably be my favorite day of the race: Stage 14.

So that’s the Tourmalet, Col d’Aspin, Col de Peyresourde, and the climb from Bagnères-de-Luchon up the hill to, uh, Superbagnères. I am, as ever, overawed by the wit and creativity of the people who name French ski resorts.

I did this math in my head⁷ but that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 vertical meters, or two and a half miles, in one day. If you stood Manhattan Island on its side, two and a half miles gets you from Battery Park to Union Square. I guess it’s two and a half miles in Manhattan’s regular horizontal configuration too. Still. That’s a lot of climbing. I know I said this race is light on 200-kilometer stages, but the 183 kilometers of Stage 14 will probably feel like 500 kilometers over flat ground.

I would guess that all this climbing in the back end of the race would advantage Jonas Vingegaard over Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel, assuming all the big guys suit up. But Pogačar could also take huge chunks out of Vingo on the earlier hilly stages, and he had no trouble distancing his Danish rival—to say nothing of the rest of the field—in the high mountains this past summer.

We won’t know until the guys line up at the start, but this looks like a pretty good course. And if that’s not the case, everyone—including me—will probably have forgotten I wrote this by next July. Woo-hoo!

1. Especially given the near-total dissolution of Twitter—where my biggest audience lies—as a means of growing a readership, and the ongoing problems stemming from the free-speech absolutist stance often taken by Substack management

2. Sorry to the guy who got pissed that I wrote a cycling newsletter that revealed the results of a race that had already happened.

3. They also released the route for the Tour de France Femmes, but I’m gonna sit on that for a couple days in case I can’t think of anything to write about for Friday.

4. Is Corsica really part of France? Hang on a second, there’s a little short guy with a funny hat and a cannon knocking on my door. Let me see what he wants real quick…

5. In a seven-year span from 2012 to 2018, Froome won four times and finished on the podium behind another Sky rider twice more.

6. Unraced since the double-traverse in 2021, last used as a summit finish in 2016

7. It’s 10:30 p.m. and I don’t know where my calculator is