The Tour de France, the most prestigious event in world cycling, will begin in 2024 in Italy for the first time in its history, with a start from Florence to kick off a 111th edition different from the others, which will have the final goal in Nice and not in paris
“The Tour has started from all the countries bordering France. He has even left six times from the Netherlands, which has no common border with France. But he has never left Italy. There is an inconsistency that is going to disappear,” Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour de France, explained to AFP, who is in Italy until Friday to present this 26th start from abroad, the third in a row after Copenhagen in 2022 and Bilbao in 2023. .
In total there will be three stages in Italy to kick off the 2024 edition of the Tour, which due to the Olympic Games in Paris that year will end in an exceptional way in Nice and not on the Champs Elysées in the capital, as the organizers had already announced. It will end with an individual time trial on July 21 in that Mediterranean city in southern France, five days before the start of the Olympic Games.
The first stage, on June 29, will link Florence with Rimini, in “a medium-mountain or even mountain stage, with a positive difference in altitude of 3,700 meters”, according to Prudhomme. The second, suitable for getaway specialists, will begin in Cesenatico and end with a final circuit in Bologna, passing through Imola, where Frenchman Julian Alaphilippe was proclaimed world champion in 2020.
The third, favorable to a sprint arrival, will go from Piacenza to Turin. The fourth stage will start on Italian soil and end on French territory.
“Desert but beautiful Florence”
“Leaving from abroad is not something that I only assume, but that I claim. The French security forces will be in high demand in 2024, so a departure from abroad can help ”, insists Prudhomme.
For the Tour will also be the occasion to pay tribute to Italian cycling, so important in history, in 2024 which marks the centenary of the first Italian victory in the Grand Boucle, that of Ottavio Bottecchia in 1924.
“At kilometer zero after Florence we will pass in front of the Gino Bartali museum (twice 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 Italian cycling legend and his champions”, underlines the Tour director.
This start of the Tour in Italy will be 70 years after the first one that took place outside of Francethat of Amsterdam in 1954. It will serve to repair a historical ‘anomaly’, that the Tour never began in a country neighboring France and with such a tradition in this sport.
There were reasons that delayed this ‘Grand Départ’ from Italy.
“At the end of March 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Matteo Renzi, former mayor of Florence and former president of the Council (of Italian Ministers), had sent me a message with a photo of his city and the text: +Florence empty, deserted, but so beautiful I have not forgotten my dreams of a Grand Départ. After the pandemic, we will see+. That triggered this,” said Prudhomme, impatient to see the runners go through the “open-air museum that is Florence, the Adriatic coast and the crossing of the Apennines.”
With information from AFP.