Tour de France 2010

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Tour de France 2010

The 2010 Tour will be launched from the south side of Rotterdam, for a prologue time-trial. The launching pad will actually be set up in Zuidplein, from where the riders will move north.

The choice of Rotterdam, a vast urban centre with one million two hundred thousand inhabitants, is directly in keeping with the special start of the Tour in London in 2007. The proposed project – “Rotterdam and the Tour, a new energy” – seduced us. It fits into an overall policy that aims to an even bigger place for the bicycle in the city’s heart, while leaning on the popularity of the biggest cycling race in the world, the Tour de France. From the banks of the Thames to the biggest port in Europe: the same desire, the same will.

In 2010, the Netherlands, which gave the bicycle its nickname of “little queen”, will host the Grand Départ of the Tour for the fifth time. A journalist recently asked me why the Netherlands has been favoured compared to the other countries (“only” three starts each for Belgium and Germany, two for Luxembourg, one for Spain and none in Italy, for instance). Besides the geographical location, which gives the organisers every freedom to organise the route in its entirety, a large part of the answer lies in these few lines, written in L’Équipe in 1954, when the Grande Boucle decided to start outside French borders for the very first time: “All of the Netherlands seemed to have gathered on the roads of Wassenaar, Delft, Rotterdam… Tens of thousands of spectators in closed ranks, uninterrupted, for kilometres and kilometres, clapping, cheering for everything that had to do with the Tour, the cyclists, the motorcyclists, the cars that followed or that led… [In this way] they made a triumph of the first stage!”

I do not believe that I am taking any risks by stating that these words were a taste of the future. A huge party is already being prepared with all the Dutch people, including, naturally, our friends from Utrecht, who are rightly disappointed today. In Rotterdam, between the Rhine and the Meuse, the Tour will depart with its feet in the water, so to speak, for the third time in a row. After Brest with the Atlantic Ocean, the Principality of Monaco with the Mediterranean Sea, here we have the North Sea, which the route across Zeeland will allow us to admire at our leisure. However, at the beginning of July 2010, it will be the enthusiasm and the jubilation of the people because of the Tour that will blow us away.

Course Video

Tour de France 2010

Running from Saturday July 3^rd to Sunday July 25^th 2010, the 97^th Tour de France will be made up of 1 prologue and 20 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,600 kilometres.

These stages have the following profiles:

• 1 prologue,
• 9 flat stages,
• 6 mountain stages and 3 summit finishes,
• 4 medium mountain stage,
• 1 individual time-trial stage (51 km).