le Tour de France 2008:
the greatest show on Earth

• Le Tour 1: the greatest show on Earth
• Le Tour 2: preparing to watch the Tour
• Le Tour 3: the Great Day arrives
• le Tour 4: preparing to watch a mountain stage
  
• Pic du Midi - observing space clearly
  
  

  site for le Tour de France (with daily reports during the race)

  Time schedules of the 2008 Tour de France stages (and other links)

  [also the original pages in French]

  
  
• Le Tour: photo album 1
• Le Tour: photo album 2
  
  
• Les Pyrénées, on the A64

• who’s left from previous years’ doping scandals?

  After the doping upheavals of 2006 and 2007, many previous top names are nowhere to be seen - Ullrich, Basso, Landis, Kashechkin, Mancebo, Heras, Contador, Kloden, Leipheimer, Vinokourov, Moreni. With three weeks to go, who is left to be the possible front-runners for the 2008 Yellow Jersey?

  Probable riders from last year’s top ten are:

Cadel Evans, from Australia, Silence-Lotto, no. 2 last year,
Carlos Sastre, from Spain, Team CSC, last year’s no.4,
Haimar Zubeldia, from Spain, Euskaltel-Euskadi, no.5 last year,
Alejandro Valverde, from Spain, Caisse d’Epargne, last year’s no.6,
Kim Kirchen, from Luxembourg, Team Columbia, last year’s no.7,
Yaroslav Popovych, from Ukraine, Silence-Lotto, no.8 last year,
Mikel Astrarloza, from Spain, Euskaltel-Euskadi, last year’s no.9,
Oscar Pereiro, from Spain, Caisse d’Epargne, no.10 last year,

so they could be in with a good chance to win this year’s 3,500 kilometre race and become the real successor to Lance Armstrong. Of the seven, Cadel Evans showed himself with a margin over the others taking part this year. Popvych, Astrarloza and Pereiro are riding second-string in their teams, making the top five in the list the most likely to appear on the leader board when the Tour ends in Paris on 27 July.

The finalised list of riders, by team, is now available. It includes:

001 EVANS Cadel
006 MC EWEN Robbie
007 POPOVYCH Yaroslav
011 SASTRE Carlos
015 O’GRADY Stuart
019 VOIGT Jens
021 ZUBELDIA Haimar
022 ASTARLOZA Mikel
031 VALVERDE Alejandro
037 PEREIRO SIO Oscar
041 KIRCHEN Kim
043 CAVENDISH Mark
047 HINCAPIE George
055 COOKE Baden
081 HUSHOVD Thor
151 ZABEL Erik
161 CASAR Sandy
198 MILLAR David

The 16th stage in the 2007 Tour de France

the results of the 2008 tour de france

• green is the new green

This year, the Green Jersey - le Maillot Vert, will have something special. The wearer will still have as much energy and tactical sense to get hold of it, but its colour will have changed.

So that this jersey will be more visible in the peleton, the Green Jersey will be lighter, in a shade exactly identical to that which it had at the moment of its creation in 1953. The colour had been modified at the beginning of the 1990s

Those ancient spectators that vibrated to the blows given to pedals by Sean Kelly, Freddy Maertens, or André Darrigade, will find again a familiar shade of green. The new heroes racing to the finish line, Tom Boonen, Robbie McEwen or Thor Hushovd, will not be slow to get a taste for this new old colour.

The 2008 Tour de France

This year’s Tour de France race starts from Brittany on 5th July, drops into Italy for a couple of days’ cycling, and finishes on the Champs-Élysées, Paris, after 21 days racing.

Note that stage 15 now starts from Embrun, not Dignes-les-Bains.
There was too great a risk of rock falls in the climb up the Col de Larche on the original route.

Here is advice on watching the circus by the roadside, with further advice for mountain stage spectating.

this year’s stages

There are 21 stages, of which five are high mountain stages [Alps 3, Pyrenees 2], four are medium mountain stages and two are individual against-the-clock [contre-le-montre] time trials. There are 2 rest days. All other days are ‘on the plain’ - relatively flat days, almost touring through France. The total distance ridden will be about 3,500 kilometres, or roughly 1,900 miles.

the teams

the prizes

To be verified when 2008 details available.

• The winner of a day’s stage wins 8,000 euro
• The yellow jersey winner - fastest time overall in the general time classification: 450,000 euro
• The green jersey winner - winning the most points. Points are given to winners of intermediate and final sprint on each stage: 25,000 euro
• The spotted jersey winner - best mountain climber, winning mountain points when going over summits and intermediate difficulties: 25,000 euro
• The white jersey winner - best under 25 y.o. in the general time classification: 20,000 euro.
• Combativity prize - chosen by a specialist cycling jury: 20,000 euro
• Best team by time - lowest time after adding together the times of the three best members of each team at each stage: 50,000 euro.]
• For the mountain stages, if the last climb is classed as 2nd or 1st difficulty, or out of classification [hors catégorie] the points for that last ascent are doubled.
• For every stage except the individual against-the-clocks, the three first riders of the intermediary sprints gain 6,4 and 2 seconds respectively, while the first three arrivals for each stage gain 20,12 and 8 seconds respectively. [There are three intermediate sprints on flat stages, 2 sprints on other stages.]

For more on the tactics of racing in the Tour de France.

last year (2007): the first thirty riders

The final day, by Xavier:
The last stage, on the final Sunday, is a stage of two, three, or is it four parts?

First comes a jolly afternoon ride through French countryside. Arch Tour rivals start to chatter, teams ride in formation - not in Indian file - but as a most un-aerodynamic array, in line across the road. The whole peleton is together - no break-aways, no competition, after all this is a travelling party celebrating a job well done. The team director will crack open a bottle or two of bubbly, and everyone will be toasting each other as they ride along. Even TV motorcyclists will join in, particularly the past spotty jersey multi-winner, now reporter - Laurent Jalabert : JaJa the Panda.

This socialising and partying continues as the peleton enters into Paris. Landmarks start to be recognisable, is that the TV Channel 2 building going past, the Eiffel Tower? Now, the champagne flutes are returned to the team cars and the riders start to settle down to the work of the last day. Up and down the cobbled Champs d’Elysée they go, round the Arch de Triumph and down the other end, to go round the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, past the seried lines of Norbert Dentressangle trucks, transporting the Tour - Norbert!

The tension starts to build as each of the eight or ten laps are made, and then it happens. The final lap has been made and.... pow, they’re off for the final crazy dash, the sprint to the finish that will determine the overall winners of the stage, the green points jersey and, maybe one day, the overall winner of this year’s Tour de France.

The last evolution of the day is the final podium. Bouquets are held high, while the attendant colour-coordinated girls appear to be sniffing the cyclists’ underarms, much shaking of hands with public worthies, bestowing of medals, national anthems, the now traditional display by the winning cyclists of their very sweet young children, suitably dressed in green, or red and white, or yellow cycling grab.

some history

The first Tour de France took place in 1903, with a first stage from Montgeron to Lyon, lasting an overwhelming 467 kilometres. There were six stages. The first Tour was 2,428 kilometers long and the prize was 6,075 francs.

watching TDF broadcasts

For 2007, there was over a hundred hours of live broadcasting on France 2 and France 3. TV production is made using cameras on five motorbikes and two helicopters, with ten fixed cameras at each stage arrival. Coverage for 2008 will be at least as

2008: [Note that several links are to pages in French, but are often fairly intuitive.]

This year, 92 TV channels will broadcast the Tour de France in 180 countries, of which 168 will provide live coverage of the race.

• The Tour de France website, www.letour.fr, now has its own YouTube channel, where you can watch many Tour-related videos.
  
  
• Live streaming broadcasts on the Net linked from the Tour de France website. This page also lists many live video links. Note that these live streaming broadcasts, when you find them from the links, often are not free. For instance, France 2 is charging continuous 2 hours: 1.69 euro, day package: 2.99 euro, week package: 14.99 euro, complete Tour: 24.99 euro.
  
  
• In Europe, as well as the French coverage, British Eurosport provides live broadcasts [schedules page].
  
  
• France 2 will show the day’s stage from about 14:25hr onwards [2.25 p.m. - 1 hour ahead of UK time, 2 hours ahead of UT/GMT]. France 3 shows the day’s stage during the morning. In essence, if you cannot find the live Tour broadcast on one of these channels, it is probably being shown on the other one.
  
  
• In the USA, Versus will be carrying daily coverage [daily video]:

  “[...] the network will, on average, air 14 hours of race action per day. Daily coverage includes a pre-race show followed by live morning race coverage, race action replays four times daily and an expanded primetime show. During the key mountain stages VERSUS will provide extended coverage beginning, some days, at 6:30 a.m. ET. Start times will vary depending on stages and rest days; a complete schedule is available at VERSUS.com.”

As well as the traditional 625-line broadcasts, from 2007, there will also be broadcasts in Full HD (High Definition - 1080 lines) for those who have the new HD televisions ( HD Ready televisions - 720 lines -can also benefit from the better image quality). However, the HD broadcasts will only be available to viewers in France using the TNT system, those with a broadband [ADSL] HD subscription or those subscribing to Canal Satellite. British Eurosport Live also has an HD service.

google street views of the TDF

This year, the French Google web site is joining in with the greatest show on Earth.

French Google is offering Street Views of the complete Tour de France, stage by stage. Google France has filmed along the complete Tour de France route, together with some nearby roads. As Google points out, even if you cannot make it to watch the Tour, this way you can look at the route and see a cyclists’ eye view of each day’s stage [click and hold, then dragging to right or left moves the picture orientation, dragging up or down gives views with more sky or more ground].

Go to French Google Maps and click on the Street View button, twenty-one camera icons marking each stage appear connected by blue route lines.

Use the zoom bar on the left of the Google Map to enlarge a blue Tour Stage route between two camera icons. You can follow the Tour de France race route from end to end, yard by yard. [These are not webcams showing the actual race, they merely provide images of the race route.]

The image above shows the view along the Champs-Elysées, part of the race route for the final day (27th July). You can lift and move (using your mouse pointer) the yellow man to change what part of the route is being viewed, or you can point to the roads highlighted in blue for the same purpose.
Double-click on a part of the image to enlarge it, and click on the “zoom arrière” box to return to the standard size.
Click on the white direction arrows to make the image ‘move along’ the road.

(There is an online video of how to access and use Street Views for the Tour de France, however, it is in French.)

You can also see the Tour de France Stage routes in Google Earth [you will need to have already installed Google Earth].

advertising
disclaimer

advertising
disclaimer

advertising
disclaimer

france

new :

on first arriving in France - driving

France is not England

Marianne - a French national symbol, with French definitive stamps

the calendar of the French Revolution

the 6th bridge at Rouen: Pont Gustave Flaubert,
new vertical lift bridge

Futuroscope

Vulcania

the French umbrella & Aurillac

the forest as seen by francois mauriac, and today

places and playtime

roundabout art of Les Landes

50 years old: Citroën DS

the Citroën 2CV:
a French motoring icon

la belle époque

Pic du Midi - observing stars clearly, A64

Carcassonne, A61: world heritage fortified city

Grand Palais, Paris

Marianne - a French national symbol, with French definitive stamps

the calendar of the French Revolution

le pique-nique

Hermès scarves

bastide towns

mardi gras! carnival in Basque country

what a hair cut! m & french pop/rock

country life in France: the poultry fair

short biography of Pierre (Peter) Abelard

email abelard@abelard.org

© abelard, 2004 - 2007,2008 18 april


all rights reserved

the address for this document is http://www.abelard.org/france/le-tour.php