Rumours abound about details of 100th race which starts in Corsica for the first time
Fans all over the World will be able to watch the presentation of the 100th Tour de France live on October 24th, as race organiser ASO will stream it live online once again. The race, which will start on Corsica - in its very first visit to the Mediterranean island - will actually be 110 years old next July, but the two World Wars in the first half of the last century meant that there were ten years with no race.
Last year 150,000 visitors watched the presentation on the race’s official website, letour.fr, and this year it will also be broadcast on Eurosport France and Eurosport International.
As well as being the hundredth edition of the race, the presentation is expected to be particularly poignant since it will be the first official Tour presentation since the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) took the decision to strip Lance Armstrong of his seven victories. The penalty has yet to be officially confirmed by the International Cycling Union (UCI), but the Tour’s director general Christian Prudhomme recently stated that he would prefer to leave the race’s victor blank between 1999 and 2005, rather than award the titles to each of the runners-up.
When the 2007 Tour de France route was presented in October 2006, in the months following Operación Puerto and Floyd Landis’ positive drugs test, a highlights video finished with the screen shattering as if the Tour’s heart was broken; with the massive scale of doping, over so many years, involved this time, something similar can surely be expected.
All that has been officially known about the route of the 2013 route is that it will begin with three stages on Corsica, before heading to the French mainland for a team time trial in the city of Nice, which will be followed by a road stage that begins in Cagnes-sur-Mer. The finish of that stage is rumoured to be Marseilles, but this will not be announced until next week.
Having visited the Alps first in 2012, the race should head west to the Pyrénées, before transferring north to the coast of Brittany, where regional newspaper Ouest-France has rumoured there will be an individual time trial to the island monastery - connected by a non-tidal causeway - of Mont St Michel.
The race should then head south and east to the Alps, with a rumoured summit finish on Mont Ventoux on the way. The race is also set to feature a finish on Alpe d’Huez, although the rumour that the race itself would end there, instead of in Paris - as reported by Het Laatste Nieuws last week - is unlikely.
Whatever the exact course will be, all will be revealed at 11:30 am CET on Wednesday, October 24th.
Tour de France 2013 stages confirmed to date:
Saturday 29th June: first stage, Porto-Vecchio to Bastia (200km)
Sunday 30th June: second stage, Bastia to Ajaccio (155km)
Monday 1st July: third stage, Ajaccio to Calvi (145km)
Tuesday 2nd July: fourth stage, Nice team time trial (distance/route unconfirmed)
Wednesday 3rd July: fifth stage, starts in Cagnes sur Mer (finish unknown)