Velo

From the Basque Country to the Champs-Élysées, every stage of this year’s Tour de France has a story. Get the inside line with the official Tour de France Race Guide from Velo, loaded with stage-by-stage insights for every summit finish, sprint, and can’t-miss moment. Read up on the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, and enjoy plenty of history, culture, and unexpected stories you will only find in the pages of the 122 page Official Tour De France Race Guide from VELO. Allez! Allez! Allez!

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CAPTURES: TOUR 2023 FANS

Tour de France Basics

10 French must-haves • We are unapologetic Francophiles. The art and food and wine and climbs of France enchant us daily, especially in July and August. Here is our selection of French must-haves to keep you focused on all things France this summer.

From Induráin to Pogacăr • I could see the hotel. I just couldn’t get to it. It was my third lap re-entering France’s efficient but expensive péage highway system to loop back around to try to find the right entrance into the parking lot. It was right there, with its blue lights flashing a welcoming beacon to this weary traveler. Yet the tangle of one-way streets, wrong exits, divided highways, traffic circles and garbled instructions saw me miss it again.

Wines of the ’24 Tour • The Tour de France and wine are somewhat inseparable bedfellows. The drinking raids of Tours past have left many cyclists with mental images of suave European cyclists lugging bottles of wine in their maillots. And no Tour broadcast is complete without Christian Vande Velde and Bob Roll’s commentary on each stage’s food and wine as a way to fill time alongside the sweeping landscape shots on peloton days. As the owner of a cycling-themed, French-focused wine shop, I get asked to pair wines to Tour stages pretty much every year. Some editions are much harder than others—years where Belgium is heavily featured, like 2019, make beer a much better match. But this year’s Tour route is a natural fit for wine. Here are seven stages I’m most excited about, along with wines from each region that would make a perfect pairing.

ANATOMY OF A RACE BIKE: 2004 & 2024

What it’s like to race Le Tour • The Tour de France is the most prestigious bike race in the world and for most of us was our introduction to the sport of cycling due to its massive media coverage. Dreaming about racing your bike for three weeks over the varied terrain that the beautiful country of France has to offer is one thing but becoming one of the very select few human beings that actually gets to race it is almost mythical.

Favorites hit by 4/4 Crash • Chute! Caduta! Caída! Crash! Whatever language it’s in, this cry over a race radio tells everyone in the team cars following the peloton that riders have fallen, Maybe it’s serious, maybe not. But on April 4 this year that’s what race personnel heard on Radio Tour partway down a high-speed descent on stage 4 of the Tour of the Basque Country in northern Spain. Then came the names of the teams who had fallen riders: “Team Visma! BORA! Soudal-Quick-Step! EF Education! Lidl-Trek! UAE! TotalEnergies!”

Few in Number, Big in Impact • Visma-Lease a Bike teammates Sepp Kuss and Matteo Jorgenson, along with EF Education-EasyPost’s Neilson Powless, are expected to headline the U.S. contingent at this year’s Tour de France—but, overall, what can North American fans expect from their countrymen? Some should be in contention for stage wins and prestigious jerseys, and one or two might even make a deep run into the General Classification.

TOUR GUIDE STARTS HERE!

THE STRENGTH OF THE TOUR ALWAYS SURPRISES ME

FROM THE MED TO THE MOUNTAINS • The 32nd L’Étape du Tour

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DOUBTFUL STARTER, DOUBTFUL FORM • Jonas...