There may still be 99 days to go until the start of the 2012 edition of the Tour de France in Liege on 30 June, but excitement is already building ahead of the Grand Depart of the 100th edition of the race in Corsica 12 months later, the first time the island will have hosted the race. Recently, organisers ASO have followed up a video released in December showcasing the island's links with cycling with one celebrating the sport's heritage in Nice, the city on the mainland where the 2013 Tour de France will resume following its visit to Corsica.
The videos may have been around for a while, but with the 2012 season now in full swing and today's sunshine and warm temperatures making us look forward to summer, we're not going to make any excuses for showing them - and it is Friday, after all.
It won't be until this autumn that we know the final route of next year's race, but what we do officially know already is that the first three stages will be held on Corsica, opening on Saturday 29 June with a sprinter-friendly 200km run from Porto-Vecchio to Bastia, which may give Team Sky’s Mark Cavendish an opportunity to get into the one Grand Tour leader’s jersey that has so far eluded him – the maillot jaune.
That is followed by a 155km stage across some tough climbs in the centre of the island from Bastia to the capital Ajaccio, then what promises to be a spectacular 145km run up Corsica’s scenic west coast to Calvi.
After its visit to Corsica, the last part of Metropolitan France that the Tour has never visited, cycling’s biggest race heads back to the mainland for a team time trial in Nice, site of then world champion Bernard Hinault’s prologue win in 1981. He would go on to win the race that year.
Stage 5 will start a little further west on the Cote d’Azur at Cagnes-sur-Mer, although there’s no news as yet of where it heads after that; Thomas Vergouwen, owner of the Velowire website, who has proved himself time and again to be the most accurate at predicting the route of the race ahead of the official announcement, believes that the destination of that stage could be Gap, with the race then heading into the Alps.
Help us to fund our site
We’ve noticed you’re using an ad blocker. If you like road.cc, but you don’t like ads, please consider subscribing to the site to support us directly. As a subscriber you can read road.cc ad-free, from as little as £1.99.
If you don’t want to subscribe, please turn your ad blocker off. The revenue from adverts helps to fund our site.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, then please consider subscribing to road.cc from as little as £1.99. Our mission is to bring you all the news that’s relevant to you as a cyclist, independent reviews, impartial buying advice and more. Your subscription will help us to do more.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
The amount of force to hold something on a hill is proportional to it's mass, so if the item is heavy enough, the human body can't output enough...
"Throw a brick at the driver: Canada has a "weapon" for pedestrians. They say that Canadian motorists have become the most attentive in the world."
IDK - but it seemed to me as OnYerBike has noted. "They do not believe the evidence provided was sufficent that there was any potential to prove...
I also hate more and more standards, that push prices up and make bicycles harder to maintain in the future....
Well for God's sake take your car, don't you go showing disrespect by turning up in those clumpy shoes with helmet hair looking like an explosion...
Apologies if this seems to be semantics/nit-picking but ... where traffic volume is sufficient / speeds fast enough to need signalised junctions...
That has been cited and I'm sure some plans might have done such damage (people have been talking about it for more than a century) but equally I...
Yeah, I spotted the new "My List" the other day but it doesn't appear to feature workouts which auto-import for that day from Training Peaks. ...
At least we will know where to go when we want to have a piss. A thoroughly unpleasant, un-decent individual not fit for public office.
You've hit the nail on the head there....