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CyclingIn 2024, for the first time, the Tour de France will start from Italy
the 111e edition of the Grande Boucle will end in Nice, due to the Olympic Games in Paris, and will leave from Florence. A historic first.
For Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour de France, this departure for Italy is the end of an “incongruity”.
AFP
The end of an “incongruity”. The Tour de France will set off from Italy in 2024 for the first time in its more than century-old history, departing from Florence for an 111th edition decidedly unlike the others with a final finish in Nice.
“The Tour started from all the countries bordering France. He even left the Netherlands six times, which has no common border with France. But he has never left Italy yet. There is a kind of incongruity that will disappear”, explains to AFP Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour de France who is in Italy until Friday to present this 26th Grand departure from abroad, the third consecutive following Copenhagen in 2022 and Bilbao in 2023.
Three stages in Italy
In total, there will be three stages in Italy to launch the 2024 edition which, due to the Olympic Games in Paris, will end exceptionally in Nice with, as the organizers had already announced, a final individual time trial on the 21 July, five days before the start of the Olympics in the capital.
The first stage, on June 29, will connect Florence to Rimini – “a mid-mountain, even mountain stage, with an elevation gain of 3700 meters”, according to Prudhomme. The second, cut out for punchers, will start from Cesenatico and end on a final circuit in Bologna via Imola, where Julian Alaphilippe won his first world championship title in 2020.
The third, promised to the sprinters, will go from Plaisance to Turin. The fourth stage should also take off in Italy and then arrive in France.
For Italian legends
“Leaving abroad, not only do I assume it but I claim it. The French security forces will be in enormous demand in 2024, so a Grand Departure from abroad can help, ”insists Prudhomme.
For the Tour, it is also an opportunity to celebrate Italian cycling, so rich, as 2024 marks the centenary of the first Italian victory in the Grand Boucle, that of Ottavio Bottecchia in 1924.
“At kilometer zero following Florence, we will pass the Gino Bartali museum (double winner of the Tour de France in 1938 and 1948). We will also pass in front of the place where Fausto Coppi rests. There will be a stage start in Cesenatico, where Marco Pantani is buried. There is an obvious link with the legend of Italian cycling and its champions”, underlines the director of the Tour.
Text from the Mayor of Florence
This Grand Départ from Italy, 70 years following the first launch from abroad (Amsterdam in 1954), therefore repairs a fairly inexplicable anomaly for two neighboring countries so passionate regarding cycling. The deal came close to closing several times but, for various reasons, was always delayed.
“At the end of March 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, Matteo Renzi, the former mayor of Florence and ex-president of the Council, texted me a photo of his city with this word: “Florence empty, deserted but so beautiful. I haven’t forgotten my Grand Départ dreams. After the pandemic, let’s see”. “It restarted the thing,” says Prudhomme, impatient to see the runners finally survey the “open-air museum of Florence, the shores of the Adriatic and the crossing of the Apennines”.
(AFP)
