PARIS — The 2025 Tour de France will be raced exclusively in France for the first time since 2020, with the 21 stages including two time-trials, a blockbuster final week in the Alps and a return to the finale on the Champs-Elysees.

After successive starts outside France, in Copenhagen in 2022, Bilbao in 2023 and Florence earlier this year, the 2025 "Grand Depart" is in the northern French city of Lille.

"We decided to bring the Tour home, it was high time after all the foreign starts," race director Christian Prudhomme said.

The 2025 edition has eight stages in the north and west, and ends with eight laps along the cobbles of the Champs-Elysees, which was absent from the 2024 route due to the Paris Olympics.

The Olympics enjoyed a huge success with a long, arduous road race around Paris, but organizers said it was too soon for the Tour to attempt that.

"We are in talks with city hall and the police about the possibility of doing that some time," Prudhomme told reporters.

A fierce struggle for the first yellow jersey — awarded to the overall race leader — will be decided on a 185-kilometer race around Lille.

Fans from just across the border in Belgium will be supporting a potential winner in double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who finished third on the Tour in 2024.

"Evenepoel has proved in the last year he is a favorite for the Tour title, and we expect him to be challenging for it next year," Prudhomme said.

The three-week extravaganza visits the northern ports of Dunkirk and Boulogne before heading to Caen, where a time trial will pay homage to those who fell in World War II, during the Battle of Normandy in 1944, which largely destroyed the city.

Organizers were keen to explain that the first week will be tough.

"A week in the plains is not the joyride it was in the old days," Prudhomme said. "We have cut the sprint stages and laid traps everywhere."

The race also makes a rare incursion into Brittany.

"France is a big country, and the Tour doesn't always get to Brittany, but, this year, both of the Tours de France, men's and women's, have major stages there," said the Brittany-born David Lappartient, head of the International Cycling Union and candidate for the IOC presidency.

Stage 7, which starts in Saint Malo, ends on the short steep climb in Murde-Bretagne where, in 2021, Mathieu van der Poel, the grandson of Raymond Poulidor — who had 12 podium finishes, but never won or led the Tour — exorcised the family curse.

"We need stages like this, going back over legendary ground, so that children can dream of the Tour as we once did," Prudhomme said.

Wine lovers will spot Chinon on stage 10, and the Rhone Valley on stage 17, but there is no Burgundy, Bordeaux or Champagne on the map at all this time around.

Tradition holds that the Tour de France is won and lost in the Alps, and this edition has been stacked with mountains in the third week.

The first peaks come as late as stage 10 in the Massif Central on July 14, France's national holiday.

A day off in Toulouse on stage 11 is followed by three blockbuster climb stages in the Pyrenees, then three more in the Alps during the last week, with a plethora of legendary Tour mountains on the menu.

Defending champion Tadej Pogacar will again start as favorite, alongside two-time winner Jonas Vingegaard and Evenepoel, who won the white jersey for best young rider on his Tour debut earlier this year.

AFP