Cycling. No Tour de France in 2025 for Paul Lapeira

The first experience of Paul Lapeira on the Tour de France last year had a bit of a bittersweet taste. Happy to enjoy the rpublic awareness with his beautiful blue-white-red tunic French championthe Parignais had been reduced to anonymity sportingly, crushed speak amazing pace imposed by the big teams in the peloton.

At the time of the assessment, he had also mentioned in our columns that a systematic presence on the biggest race in the world would not be not an obsession during his career. We thought then that his remarks were made out of fatigue and that he would revise his judgment by discovering October 2024 the Tour de France 2025 map, with a first week calibrated for punchers like him and above all a stage which will make a long foray on the roads from his native South Channel.

No Tour de France in 2025

Obviously, the sentimental side did not come into play: on Thursday, Paul Lapeira announced that he would not do the Tour de France in 2025, any more than the Giro or the Vuelta. “It is not the plan to do a Grand Tour this year,” he explained yesterday in the newspaper L’Équipe.

Failing to see him at work on July 10, 2025 in the Mortain coast or Saint-Michel-de-Montjoie, his supporters will have to turn on the television to watch his exploits this season. Much more confident than last year at this time, sure of his strength, the Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale puncher intends to “win big one-day races at World Tour level” and intends to keep his national champion jersey. “I still have so many ambitions, so much to do,” he says, ensuring he presses all the cursors to continue his upward trajectory.

Every year, I try to improve what I put in place, I question myself.

The classics in the viewfinder

His season, which resumes in ten days in Australia at the Tour Down Under (January 21-26), will be structured around classics like the Strade Bianche, the Bretagne Classic, the GPs in Canada and of course the Ardennaises, his favorite playground where he revealed himself last year (5th in the Amstel Gold Race, 11th in Liège-Bastogne-Liège) and where he should form a formidable Norman duo with his teammate Benoît Cosnefroy, if of course the latter quickly regains his condition after his knee operation scheduled for next week.

After a year 2024 punctuated by five successes, including one in the World Tour at the Tour du Pays Basque, the bar is high for Paul Lapeira. But with his rigor, his determination, his winning temperament and quite simply his talent, we have no doubt of his ability to do “even better” and to sit without hesitation at the table of the best punchers in the world.

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