Thierry Gouvenou: route maker

Thierry Gouvenou has a fascinating job.

He is part of a small team of people who design the route for the Tour de France: my favourite sporting event.

This could be one of the greatest creative geographically based endeavours there is...

Thierry works with Tour director Christian Prudhomme.

This requires a huge amount of work to create stages which will try to create pressure on each team, and opportunities for each team, sprinters, climbers and breakaways.. which will showcase the French landscape and its small villages, connecting the Alps and Pyrenees.

There are certain sections of road which will appear periodically and can be slotted in - including classic climbs such as Mt. Ventoux, and some cols which may be tackled both ways: up and down.

There are lots of decisions here which need to be engineered. History and culture needs to be showcased. There is also the need to connect to cities which pay large sums for the privilege of being hosts for the start or finish (or both) of a stage.

The Rouleur piece linked to at the start of the piece has some great quotes outlining the process.

“My first concern is the riders and the racing, but then there is the aesthetic aspect of the race and the historic aspect. That is something that we really think about when we are coming up with a Tour route. We are constantly thinking about the history of the Tour, but also the history of France. After all, the Tour de France is also a tour of France. That is super important for us because 50% of the people who watch the Tour de France don’t know anything about cycling, they are watching it because it is beautiful.”

This year there was a change to the final stage, taking in Montmartre which seems to have gone well, and was borrowed from the Olympics - when the race had to end outside of Paris.

Gouvenou is a former professional racing cyclist so he knows why the route is so important.

• Routes are either clockwise or counter-clockwise.
• The route for the following year is unveiled in October the preceding year.
• Prudhomme began adding spice to the transitions with punchy uphill finales, varied terrain, and even pavé according to this VELO piece.

“I’ve always liked maps and geography, so to design the Tour is a fun endeavour,”

Gouvenou says. “Many of the roads are from memory, from racing and training, but we use new technology as much as we can.” 

That includes not just predictable tools like GPS and Google Earth but even Strava, which Gouvenou has used to dis- cover new roads and climbs.

He also goes out on the road and follows each stage to check access / gradients and the road surface - which sometimes needs to be renewed before the race can use it. It has to be able to cope with the support vehicles and other aspects of the race.

"A third person in the team: Stéphane Boury helps to make the route a reality, and make sure the routes are practical. With an entourage topping 5,000 people, plus hundreds of vehicles, millions of fans, and all the attendant infrastructure, the Tour is a logistical beast that is exponentially more difficult than, say, hosting a soccer match in a stadium."

There are over a hundred trucks and the finish line needs to have room for all the barriers and also be safe for riders and spectators and the support vehicles and the world's press and broadcasting equipment plus team trucks and buses, and the podium set up for presentations etc.

A huge jigsaw puzzle which has to be right... and is also sometimes changed by circumstances beyond their control, such as landslides or snow accumulations.