Tour de France 2023 routes – All the rumours ahead of the official presentation
The routes for the 2023 editions of the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes will be unveiled in Paris on October 27 in one of the most highly-anticipated non-racing events of the cycling calendar.
Race organisers ASO do their best to keep a lid on the details until they click play on their carefully constructed video montages in the Palais de Congrès, but reports, leaks, and rumours never fail to circulate ahead of the big reveal.
Local French newspapers are all scrambling to bring readers details of when the Tour might roll into their corner of the Hexagon, while Thomas Vergouwen at the VeloWire website is, as ever, compiling these reports and combing them with his own sleuthing to produce an overview, at least of the men’s route.
The 110th edition of the men’s Tour de France will take place from July 1-23, starting in Bilbao, Spain, and finishing in the French capital Paris. The second edition of the modern incarnation of the women’s Tour de France – the Tour de France Femmes – will start on July 23 and finish on July 30, with the start and finish locations still unknown.
Cyclingnews looks at all the rumours and potential outlines for both routes. With two weeks to go, more information will emerge ahead of the presentation, and we’ll update this story with anything significant that comes to light.
Tour de France Femmes 2023 route
What we know about the Tour de France Femmes route
If ASO has a tight lid on the Tour de France route, they have an even tighter one on the Tour de France Femmes route details.
The second edition of the new version of the women’s Tour de France will begin on July 23, on the same day as the stage 21 conclusion of the men’s race, and the route will finish at an unknown location on July 30.
The women’s race is currently scheduled to be held across eight stages again; however, it is not likely to begin on the Champs-Elysées circuits in Paris as it did in 2022.
The return of the women’s Tour de France after three decades of absence offered a historical moment in women’s cycling, and the two events – the women’s opening stage 1 and the men’s closing stage 21 – were held on the same day in Paris. Lorena Wiebes (Team DSM) won the circuit race and took the first yellow jersey to kick off the eight-day women’s race. Later that evening, Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) took the bunch sprint to win stage 21 of the men’s event as Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) sealed the overall victory.
It was the perfect hand-over of the yellow jersey from the men’s race to the women’s race as the peloton, fans, and media departed Paris on stage 2 to follow the women’s event across the northeast and into the Vosges mountains for the finale atop La Super Planche des Belles Filles where Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar) was crowned the overall champion.
Many of the event’s top riders, including Van Vleuten, suggested that the Tour de France Femmes, while only in its second edition, was so successful this year that it perhaps no longer needs to start on the coattails of the men’s race.
In total, there were nearly 20 million viewers in France across the eight days of racing, with an average per stage of 2.25 million on France 2 and France 3 delivering an audience share of 26.4%, according to official Tour de France Femmes figures. The finale alone was watched by more than 5 million French viewers.
The speculation is that the Grand Départ could move away from the hustle and bustle of the Paris circuits – out from under the men’s race – and begin in an all-new location in 2023.
Massif Central
Speculation in La Montagne places the Grand Départ of the Tour de France Femmes in the Massif Central on July 23. Specifically, the race looks likely to begin in Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the Auvergne region.
It was reported that Tour de France Femmes director Marion Rousse visited the Auvergne region to consider Clermont-Ferrand as the starting point for next year’s event, along with its potential to host multiple stages.
The area is set to host multiple stages of the men’s event, too, with Clermont-Ferrand Mayor Olivier Bianchi saying that gender equality was an important factor in its bid to host the opening stage of the women’s race.
Although the type of race has not been revealed, top riders such as Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig (FDJ-Suez-Futuroscope) say that the possible move away from a Paris opener could allow the race to expand into new terrain and possibly bring in a time trial. This discipline was sorely missed in this year’s race event.
Beginning in the Massif Central could also mean that the event could see more decisive stages in the first few days of racing, with speculation that the women’s race, like the men’s, could visit Puy de Dôme.
Where to next?
Your guess is as good as ours.
While many had hoped for the event to visit the iconic Tour de France mountains of the Alps and Pyrénées this year, there were obvious challenges and limitations to how much of the countryside the Tour de France Femmes could traverse in just eight days.
Unless ASO is secretly planning to expand the number of days for the 2023 Tour de France Femmes, the peloton will need to complete eight days of racing inside a reasonably sized area of France. It cannot feasibly visit all of the areas the men’s race visits, but moving away from Paris could mean the race will see new places next year.
A starting point in the Massif Central means the race could venture east to the Alps, where the race could hit iconic ascents such as L’Alpe d’Huez or south to the Pyrénées for mountain passes such as the Col du Tourmalet. The sky is the limit.
Tour de France 2023 route
What we know about the Tour de France route
As it stands, we only have official details on two-and-a-half of the 21 stages of the men’s Tour de France. The Grand Départ has been awarded to the Basque Country in Spain, and the opening two stages have already been unveiled, along with the start location of stage 3, which will see the Tour cross into France to an as-yet-unknown finishing location.
The 2023 Tour de France begins in Bilbao on July 1, with a 185km route that heads out to the hilly coastline of the Bay of Biscay before returning to Bilbao for a late, steep climb of the Pike Bidea and the finish in the city centre. Stage 2 features more punchy terrain on a 210km route from Vitoria-Gasteiz to Donostia San Sebastián, with the Jaizkibel climb – well known from the Donostia San Sebastián Klasikoa – close to the finish.
Stage 3 will start in Amorebieta-Etxano and track 80km along the Basque Country coastline before reaching the French border. And that’s where the official details come to an end.
What could follow
Newspapers on either side of the border have reported with confidence that stage 3 will finish in Bayonne, the small city near Biarritz. Bayonne is around 30km up the coast from the Spanish border, and the stage would almost certainly culminate in a sprint finish, possibly along the banks of the Adour river.
The Tour de France then looks set for an early foray into the Pyrenees. First-week climbing stages have been common in recent years, but the two major ranges of the Alps and Pyrenees are usually saved for the second and third weeks. The Basque start, however, is just a stone’s throw from the Pyrenees, which means it would be a logistical headache to go elsewhere and then come back again.
That, in turn, would make it likely that we’ll only scratch the surface of the difficulties the Pyrenees has to offer, given the organisers will not want to lay down such decisive stages in the first week. There have been precious few reports of any of the range’s more famous climbs, making any marquee summit finish unlikely.
Most of the media reporting around these stages comes from the well-regarded Sud Ouest regional newspaper, which suggests stage 4 will make its way into the Pyrenees from Dax to finish in Laruns. There is no shortage of major mountains in the vicinity of the finish town, so there should be a late climb and descent to the line, with Primož Roglič and Tadej Pogačar both winning there in recent years.
Sud Ouest speculates that stage 5 will see an uphill finish at Cauterets after a start from the Tour’s most-visited city of Pau. Cauterets is only a category-3 drag but was preceded by the Col d’Aspin and Col du Tourmalet when it was last used in 2015. Again, it remains to be seen how hard this stage ends up being.
Clues to stage 6 are scarcer still. Sud Ouest mentions the possibility of a time trial, but at this stage, it’s speculative.
What they report with more certainty is that stage 7 will take the race north, starting in Mont-de-Marsan – the adopted hometown of 1973 Tour winner Luis Ocaña – and finishing in Bordeaux. It’s a major city but hasn’t hosted a Tour stage finish since Mark Cavendish won in 2010. There could be another big city finish – and potential bunch sprint – the next day, with France Bleu reporting that stage 8 will head to Limoges, possibly from Libourne.
Stage 9, as is customary, will be the final stage of the opening week ahead of the first rest day, and it’s set to be a hotly-anticipated affair. Rumours of a return to the Puy de Dome have been circulating for a while, and this looks to be the day, according to La Montagne. The climb up the dormant volcano hasn’t been used since 1988 but has a storied history, including the Poulidor-Anquetil duel in 1964 and the time a spectator punched Eddy Merckx in 1975.
Stage winners include Fausto Coppi, Federico Bahamontes, Luis Ocaña, Lucien Van Impe, and Joop Zoetemelk. Although not overly long, the main 5.8-kilometre ascent of the climb, which spirals around the central cone of the volcano, is unremittingly steep and spectacular, with gradients averaging around 12%.
The first rest day will come on July 10, with La Montagne’s report indicating this will be in the city of Clermont-Ferrand. This lies in the Auvergne region just outside the chain of old volcanos in that corner of the Massif Central, so the second week could open with more medium mountains.
La Montagne is still the local newspaper here and reports a finish in Issoire to the south of Clermont-Ferrand on stage 10, which would be a flat finish but likely preceded by hilly terrain. Stage 11 is then said to loop back to start in Clermont-Ferrand before finishing in Moulins. This would take the race north out of the Massif Central and would likely be a flatter affair, especially towards the finish.
Rumours and sketchy details about the second half
The second half of the 2023 Tour de France is where things become far less clear. There are still two weeks to go until the big reveal but still, it’s rare for such little detail to have emerged about the final ten days.
What’s certain is that the race will visit the Alps. There have also been whispers of mountain stages in the Vosges and the Jura. The question is in what order they appear. One newspaper has speculated about a rather wild swing from the Alps to the Pyrenees in the final week, but that appears farfetched.
The Dauphiné Libéré is the newspaper that covers the Alps, and it claims to know of two stage finishes, one in Morzine and one on the Col de la Loze. Morzine is a ski resort that has hosted multiple Tour visits, with stage finishes usually coming after the hors-catégorie climb and hair-raising descent of the Col de Joux Plane.
The Dauphiné also reports a return to the Col de la Loze, the high-altitude traffic-free mountain pass that links Méribel and Courchevel. Effectively a pair of bike paths tacked onto the road summits of both ski resorts, they meet at the peak of 2,304 metres, with wicked irregular gradients on both sides. It’s unclear which side would be used this time, but Miguel Angel Lopez was the winner when they came up from Moutiers via Meribel in 2020, with Roglič riding away from Pogačar just before his crushing defeat in the Planche des Belles Filles time trial.
There is no firm indication of when these Alpine stages will take place. Ordinarily, they’d be expected in the final week. Otherwise, there’d be the prospect of a finale without either of the two main mountain ranges. However, that is what Velowire suggests, even if its outline for the race’s second half is extremely vague.
One rumour is that the race could see an all-new summit finish in the Vosges mountains on another traffic-free route. The Vosges has been favoured in recent years, with extensive visits to La Planche des Belles Filles, but the major rumour for 2023 revolves around the Grand Ballon, last used in 2019 but never as a summit finish. France Bleu notes that local officials are planning to build a 5km path from Geishouse up the Col du Haag, which is said would be a 13km climb with nearly a vertical kilometre, thus making it the only hors-catégorie climb in the Vosges mountains.
With the organisers increasingly seeking out novelties, and with the added benefit of promoting traffic-free roads, this could follow on from the Col de la Loze and provide a dramatic finale to the Tour. However, this is shaky at best; the road doesn’t even exist yet.
There are very few other details of the Tour de France route. Velowire mentions a possible summit finish on the Grand Colombier in the Jura mountains en route from the Auvergne stages to the Alps stages. It then mentions the Grand Ballon but its outline for the final week is almost non-existent.
It’s also worth noting there are no real reports of any time trialling stages as yet, but there will obviously be at least one, with the recent trend – five of the past six editions – favouring penultimate-day TTs.
The route returns to more solid ground with the traditional final stage into Paris. This would follow the well-trodden route up and down the Champs-Elysées, but the reports in Le Parisien report to a stage start at – and possibly inside, on the track of – the velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. That’s where the track cycling at the 2024 Paris Olympics will take place – so the finish of the Tour could, somewhat ironically, celebrate the event that will force it to move away from Paris to a temporary final destination of Nice in 2024.