Tour de France to return to Andorra next year for three-day visit

Next year’s 103rd edition of the Tour de France will spend three days in Andorra – its first visit there since 2009, when Lance Armstrong fell out with Astana team mate Alberto Contador, and Bradley Wiggins first showed his climbing skills.

It will be the second visit by a Grand Tour to the Pyrenean principality in less than a year, with the Vuelta heading to Andorra for three days this September.

Yesterday, Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme and Andorra’s minister of tourism, Francesc Camp, announced that a memorandum of understanding had been reached for the race to return in 2016.

The race, which starts next year at Mont-St-Michel in Normandy’s Manche department, will spend three days in Andorra, with a stage finish, a rest day and a stage start.

It will be the fifth time the race has stopped there, the last being in 2009 when Brice Feillu of Agritubel won a stage at Andorra-Arcalis that had started in Barcelona.

Fellow escapee Rinaldo Nocentini of AG2R-La Mondiale was a fellow member of the break and ended the day in the race leader’s yellow jersey.

The day was notable for Contador, the eventual winner of the race, attacking the elite group on the final climb and moving second overall, ahead of then Astana team mate Armstrong.

Garmin-Slipstream rider Wiggins, meanwhile, ended the day fifth on the General Classification, the first time he showed his ability to keep with the favourites in the mountains.

He would finish the race fourth overall, and has since been elevated to third after Armstrong’s disqualification, but few that day would have singled him out as someone who could win the race just three years later.

The full route of next year’s Tour de France will be unveiled in Paris in October.