The 2023 Tour de France: more mountains than ever and less time trial

The duel of Vingegaard, in yellow, and Pogacar, in the Tour of 22. MARCO BERTORELLO (AFP)

Between the melancholy of the names, and the lamentations, the numbers sneak in, without soul, the physics of the Tour, exaggerated, unbalanced, in the 2023 edition, from July 1 to 23, from Bilbao to Paris, 120 years exact from the first Tour.

A snake painted in the hexagon that from the mountains of the Basque Country, Jaizkibel, does not leave a massif without licking, the diagonal from west to east that leads from the Pyrenees to the Massif Central to the Jura to the Alps, and, with a prodigious jump, winged snake, to the Vosges.

Woe to the flat lands, Brittany, Normandy, the North, the Charente, Provence and the Midi, and the center.

The Tour of 23 forgets them.

The official brochure summarizes: eight flat or slightly bumpy stages, four mid-mountain stages, eight high-mountain stages with four high-altitude finishes, Cauterets (6th), Puy de Dôme (9th), Grand Colombier (13th), Mont Blanc, and other names in between that take your breath away: Soudet and Marie Blanque (5th stage);

Aspin and Tourmalet (6th);

Ramaz and Joux Plane (14th), Forclaz and Croix Fry (15th);

Saisies, Cormet de Roselend, La Loze and Courchevel (17th), Petit Ballon and Platzerwasel (20th), in the stage that mirrors that of the Women's Tour of 22 in which Annemiek van Vleuten overwhelmed.

Mountains to go-go, and from the first day, and 30 in total, more than in any Tour of the last decade, an elephant and, at his side, a mouse, the minimum 22 kilometers of time trial, a single day, through the Sallanches of the Hinault of 1980, the slope of Domancy (16th),

and seeing his profile even the purest climbers smile.

In the last decade, only in 2015 there were fewer kilometers of individual time trial, 13.8, to which 28 were added by teams.

It is the Tour that makes everyone smile.

To the winners of recent years, except for Geraint Thomas.

But yes to Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar, who were the best time trialists and also untouchables in the mountains;

to Egan Bernal revived, the best on the mountain;

the Tour that Enric Mas dreamed of or Mikel Landa could dream of, the Spanish from the mountains who are allergic to goats.

"I love the tour," says Pogacar.

“It will be a difficult and tough race from day one.

And it has a lot of mountains, especially in the first and last weeks, which I love”.

The tour.

The favorite toy of Christian Prudhomme, the director of the race, who does not give up his childish soul, the tales his grandfather told him of Anquetil and Poulidor, shoulder to shoulder at the Puy de Dôme, and all of France held its breath .

Prudhomme has read that the first great Basque cycling idol, and the Tour departs from the Basque Country, which costs 12 million euros in detail, was Jesús Loroño, who, starting from a farmhouse in Larrabetzu (Bizkaia), arrived in Paris as king of the mountain in 1953, and began scoring points at the top of Cauterets, to which it returns 70 years later.

And the Lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu appears at the Palais des Congrès in Paris, and goes up to the stage of the presentation, to speak, in Basque, Spanish, French, about “a singular country”.

And it ends, Ongi Etorri, welcome, Ongi ETourri...

Prudhomme, above all, the almighty chief.

who does not want to stop being the boy who fell in love with Luis Ocaña, who did not win the Tour of '71, the one in which he killed Merckx at Puy de Dôme and Orcières Merlette, before falling in the Pyrenees, and his beautiful bloody and torn yellow merino jersey.

That he won the Tour of 73. 50 years ago.

And his love, and his sadness, proclaim it.

In Nogaro, between Mont de Marsan and Auch, the heart of the Armagnac and not far from the Landes, the fourth stage ends.

He does it on the Paul Armagnac circuit in which Juan Luis Ocaña, Luis's son, and his tattoos compete on a motorcycle, and it is half a dozen kilometers from Caopenne d'Armagnac, where Luis had his vineyards, and in them a small house in which he shot himself in the head on the afternoon of May 19, 1994, at the age of 49.

The Tour will pass through there, and through the Adour villages where the boy from Priego lived with his emigrated family, Cuenca, the forests where his father worked, through Aire and Le Houga, and through Labastide d'Armagnac, the little chapel of Notre Dame des Cyclistes and its stained glass windows by Hanry Anglade, where he married Josiane on Christmas Day 1966, and, of course, Mont de Marsan, the capital, where Pierre Cescutti,

Resistance leader who leads the first company of soldiers to enter Berlin and drink the wine from Hitler's bunker, adopted him and took care of him, where they took his body to the judicial deposit, and only four people watched over him.

The places of the Tour of 23. The places of Ocaña.

The places whose names will be erased by the team engineers, the preparers, the planners.

They will tear the Tour apart, they will extract its poetry, they will convert it into a geometric sum, tangents, radii, diagonals, in a calculation of watts and slopes, and perhaps someone who has studied so much will remember that because the brother-in-law of a physicist who did not he forgot poetry, Blaise Pascal, he ascended the Puy de Dôme in the 17th century with a barometer, we know that the air is thinner at heights because the higher up, the less the atmosphere weighs,

and it is easier to move forward and more difficult to breathe, because it is more difficult for the body to steal oxygen from the air, which presses so little already close to the infinite vacuum.

The one who waits for those who forget.

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