2024 Tour de France Pre-Race Cheat Sheet

Breaking down all the need-to-know information as we head into the biggest race of the season

The biggest cycling race in the world, the Tour de France, kicks off this coming weekend in the Tuscan hills of Florence. For the second year in a row, in addition to a foreign start, instead of the usual mix of an opening time trial and a few sprint stages, we get two tough and potentially decisive stages on the opening weekend, as well as a mountain stage as early as Stage 4. These early tests will be vital to seeing how each General Classification contender has come into the race and immediately rule out any that have made even the slightest error in preparation.

This intriguing course wrinkle means we will immediately see how the pair of two-time Tour Champions, Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, have entered the race and, most importantly, how Vingegaard has recovered from his terrible crash at the Tour of the 3Basque Country in April.

Outside of the GC competition, which will see Pogačar aiming to complete the historically challenging feat of winning both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same season, the next three weeks will serve up plenty of thrilling stage win battles, especially the sprints, which will pit sprinting’s new bad boy, Jasper Philipsen, against its original heel, Mark Cavendish. And, with top-tier Classics riders Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel, and Mads Pedersen present and ready to contest nearly every stage, we should be in for an incredible and memorable race (which will be broken down in detail daily for premium subscribers of this newsletter).

BTP Tour de France Fantasy League Info:
Link: VeloGames
League Name: BeyondthePeloton_Tour2024
League Code: 743128425

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  2024 Tour de France Route Overview:

  The highlights for this year’s race are the foreign start in Italy (Florence), an early alpine day with the peloton tackling the brutal Col du Galibier on Stage 4 on the road back to France, a gravel challenge on Stage 9, the difficult third week, and the finish with an extremely tough final three stages in the alps, punctuated by a final-day time trial in Nice instead of the usual procession in Paris (due to the 2024 Olympics occupying the city). Notably, the regions in the Northwest of the country, like the cycling-mad Brittany, have been wholly excluded for the third consecutive year.

  

  Full Stage List
  Stage 1: Florence > Rimini (205km)-medium mountains
  Stage 2: Cesenatico > Bologna (200km)-hills
  Stage 3: Piacenza > Turin (225km)-flat
  Stage 4: Pinerolo > Valloire (138km)-mountains
  Stage 5: Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne > Saint Vulbas (177km)-flat
  Stage 6: Mâcon > Dijon (163km)-flat
  Stage 7: Nuits-Saint-Georges > Gevrey-Chambertin (25km)-ITT
  Stage 8: Semur-en-Auxois > Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises (176km)-hills
  Stage 9: Troyes > Troyes (199km)-hills & gravel
  July 9th: Rest Day #1
  Stage 10: Orléans > Saint-Amand-Montrond (187km)-flat
  Stage 11: Évaux-les-Bains > Le Lioran (211km)-mountains w/summit finish
  Stage 12: Aurillac > Villeneuve-sur-Lot (204 km)-flat
  Stage 13: Agen > Pau (171km)-flat
  Stage 14: Pau > Saint-Lary-Soulan Pla d'Adet (152km)-mountains w/summit finish
  Stage 15: Loudenvielle > Plateau de Beille (198km)-mountains w/summit finish
  July 15th: Rest Day #2
  Stage 16: Gruissan > Nîmes (187km)-flat
  Stage 17: Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux > Superdévoluy (178km)-hills
  Stage 18: Gap > Barcelonnette (179km)-hills
  Stage 19: Embrun > Isola 2000 (145km)-mountains w/summit finish
  Stage 20: Nice > Col de la Couillole (133km)-mountains w/summit finish
  Stage 21: Monaco > Nice (34km)-ITT w/mountains

  Breakdown by Stage Type:

  • 7 mountain stages*

    • 5 summit finishes

  • 7 flat(ish) stages

  • 5 hilly stages

    • 1 gravel stage

  • 2 time trials

    • 59 kilometers total

      • 10 climbing kilometers

BTP 2024 Tour de France GC Contender Tiers
Tier 1) Tadej Pogačar
Tier 2) Primož Roglič, Jonas Vingegaard,
Tier 3) Adam Yates, João Almeida, Aleksandr Vlasov, Carlos Rodríguez
Tier 4) Matteo Jorgenson, Remco Evenepoel
Tier 5) Juan Ayuso, Enric Mas, Simon Yates, Egan Bernal

• Only two riders in the sport have proven they can push at or near 7 watts per kilogram for sustained periods every time the moment calls during a three-week race and have the racing skills to make it count: Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard. There is simply nobody else who should be considered a serious potential winner.

  • Simple logic tells us that Vingegaard’s disrupted training schedule means he will be at least slightly below his regular supersonic level, and when racing someone as good as Pogačar, being even just a fraction less than your best can prove fatal.

• Some of these tiers may contradict betting markets and conventional wisdom, but it is important to remember that recent form is a key predictor of Tour de France success. So, in overly simplistic terms, we should expect the riders who are currently riding well to do well at the Tour de France.

  • With Adam Yates, João Almeida, and Aleksandr Vlasov looking to be on incredible form at the pre-Tour tune-up races, Critérium du Dauphiné and Tour de Suisse, relative to their main rivals, they should be considered the riders most likely to challenge for the remaining podium placings.

BTP will be seamlessly following every twist and turn of the 2024 Tour de France with the fantastic Tour Tracker app (iPhone/Android/Web)

Three Key Course Takeaways

1) On This Surface, this is a Balanced Route, but Dig a Little Deeper, and Major Eccentricities Emerge: One of the major headlines coming out of Wednesday’s reveal was how much this route has found a balance between individual time trials and climbing.

• For example, the 59 kilometers of individual time trial is the most since 2013 and well above the 2010-2013 average of 46.4km.

• And, on the flip side, the estimated 53,095 of vertical meters gained is less than last year, which takes the BTP Difficulty Rating (total vertical meters gained over total TT kilometers) down from 2023’s insane 25.4 to a more reasonable 9.0.

• While this may make the course appear balanced, if we look deeper, Saturday’s opening weekend in Italy, which features three stages over 200 kilometers, along with a significant amount of climbing, and the passage of the Col du Galibier en route to France on Stage 4, is extremely unusual and will create a difficult opening few days of racing.

  • For reference, the entire 2023 Tour de France only featured two stages over 200 kilometers, while this year will feature that in the first two stages, and end with a total of five 200+km stages.

2) Interestingly, These Raw Course Metrics Could Have Little Effect on the Eventual Winner: The open secret about the Tour de France is that no matter what the course looks like and how many time trial kilometers and vertical climbing meters, the race plays out incredibly similarly, and the winners are almost always the same type of rider.

• For example, since 2015, despite a wide variety of difficulty ratings, all but two editions have been won by the rider who is both an extremely strong time trialist and climber who, for lack of deeper analysis, is simply the strongest rider across every type of terrain (essentially, Pogačar or Vingegaard).

  • Past Winner List, Specialty & Course Difficulty Rating:
    2010: Alberto Contador, climber, 8.32
    2011: Cadel Evans, hybrid climber/time trialist, 11.98
    2012: Bradley Wiggins, time trialist, 5.03
    2013: Chris Froome, hybrid climber/time trialist, 7.8
    2014: Vincenzo Nibali, climber, 9.41
    2015: Chris Froome, hybrid climber/time trialist, 34.7
    2016: Chris Froome, hybrid climber/time trialist, 9.88
    2017: Chris Froome, hybrid climber/time trialist, 13.27
    2018: Geraint Thomas, hybrid climber/time trialist, 15.48
    2019: Egan Bernal, climber, 19.36
    2020: Tadej Pogačar, hybrid climber/time trialist, 16.36
    2021: Tadej Pogačar, hybrid climber/time trialist, 8.90
    2022: Jonas Vingegaard, hybrid climber/time trialist, 9.22
    2023: Jonas Vingegaard, hybrid climber/time trialist 25.4
    2024: ?, 9.0

    • This predictability of racing style and winner type is due to the extremely high stakes of even minor results at the Tour, creating an all-out type of racing that neutralizes road stages by limiting the time gaps on even the hardest stages and places a major emphasis on time trials, even if the raw amount is minimal since TTs are one of the only pieces of the course where the strongest rider can pull clear of the others.

3) Instead of the Raw Ingredients, the Order in Which They Are Used Could Prove to Be the Most Critical Factor: It will be a terrifying prospect for anyone who watched the recent Giro d’Italia, but this route, which features a surprisingly tough opening week and a tough final week, has the potential to mirror the dynamic of that race, where Tadej Pogacar leveraged the difficult opening weekend and first-week time trial to expose less-well-prepared GC contenders by delivering an early knockout blow.

• These opening stages and Pogačar’s early-race blitz strategy could be especially relevant since Pogačar’s only GC equal, Jonas Vingegaard, is coming into this race with a highly disrupted pre-race training regime due to being forced off the bikes for weeks (two spent in-patient in a hospital) after his crash in April.

• Additionally, the presence of such a brutal and important final three stages means that the best of the rest of the GC riders may find themselves in the top ten but trailing Pogačar by a large margin after the Stage 7 time trial. This means they will almost certainly go into GC hibernation for the middle section of the race, looking to minimize risk to maximize their chances of an eventual top-five placing.

  • As Pogačar learned at the Giro, if he can come out swinging and build a sizeable early lead, he can mentally defeat the rest by forcing them to view his lead as unassailable and essentially ignore him as race leader as they jostle position for the lesser GC placings.

    • The only rider this logic doesn’t apply to is Vingegaard, but with such a disrupted run-up and so many question marks surrounding his form, it is hard to believe he will be fit enough to press Pogačar through the middle section of the race while still having enough left to finish off the race with a winning effort. After all, as we saw last year with Pogačar, the latter half of the race is where an abridged training schedule starts to reveal itself.