Tour de France 2025 – The Tour in Montmartre: the meaning of the party

Paris is a party, wrote Ernest Hemingway, great author and equally great lover of bicycles. The track events, especially the Six Days, particularly stimulated his imagination but the American, a Parisian by adoption, would have shone at the heart of the madness which had seized the French capital, and particularly the Butte Montmartre, during of the online races of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The organizers counted nearly a million spectators for the occasion… The party was so beautiful. Will she have a tomorrow?

Since the outbursts of jubilation of August 4, 2024, “we” have dreamed of bringing the greatest champions back to the streets of Lepic and Belleville and above all of reliving these moments of crazy grace. “We” fantasize about a classic in Paris and “we” especially remember that the Tour de France traditionally parades on the Champs-Élysées following a prestigious circuit but without much relief. The scenario that would once again put Remco Evenepoel in front of the Sacré-Coeur has started to take shape in recent weeks.

“No comments“, opposes for the moment the company Amaury Sport Organization (which organizes the Tour and operated on the cycling events of the Games), after Le Parisien revealed a request to the prefecture to pass the last stage of the Tour de France 2025 on the Montmartre circuit Last October, during the presentation of the Tour, attentive observers were already able to notice that the profile outlined for the last stage, on July 27 (one year to the day after the coronation. d'Evenepoel on the Olympic time), did not correspond to the usual circuit on the Champs-Élysées, with a final descent to plunge towards the finish.

Last month, the director of the Tour, Christian Prudhomme, did not let anything slip but he stressed that the logistical and security headache of such a stage could only be overcome with strong political support to give a new shine to the parade des Champs, without revolutionizing the finale of the Grande Boucle.

Prudhomme, who knows his Tour history like the back of his hand, also does not fail to point out that the last stage took place on the Champs-Élysées 50 years ago, in 1975. And he had already had to count on a big political boost to inaugurate an event that is more festive than sporting.

This episode is one of the tales and legends of the Great Loop, which have been passed down by word of mouth since the beginning of the 20th century, then ended up being written down. As is often the case on the Tour, a journalist is at the initiative: Yves Mourousi, television man, who also dreamed of a Formula 1 grand prix in Paris. Having died in 1998, he will not see the Paris “ePrix” at the end of the 2010s. As for the Tour sur les Champs, it also promised to be difficult…

At the time, already, the Paris prefecture was balking at the demands of the Tour management, embodied by the journalists Jacques Goddet and Félix Lévitan. So Mourousi addressed the top of the State, during a meeting with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing at the Salon du Cheval, at the end of 1974… The president elected a few months earlier was in the official gallery to see his daughter compete . See the Tour end with the self-proclaimed “most beautiful avenue in the world“enthusiasm:”What are you waiting for to do it?“

Since 1975, we have followed the same rituals every year. The winners toast. The losers console themselves by remembering that reaching Paris is a victory in itself. Future illustrious retirees are honored at their first crossing of the line. The attackers liven up the laps of the circuit but, with five exceptions (Alain Meslet opened the ball in 1977, Bernard Hinault snatched victory in yellow…), they fail to surprise the sprinters who crossed the mountains to compete for their championship of the unofficial world. Only the explosion of 1989, when Greg LeMond traumatized Laurent Fignon and the French public for a handful of seconds, broke the tradition.

The 2024 edition, with a relocated arrival to Nice and the return of a final time trial, awakened these chimeras… They smashed against the arch-domination of Tadej Pogacar, so much so that we remember above all from this stage the drone shots which accompanied the Slovenian in the dive towards the finish…

We might as well say it straight away, without even knowing the precise profile that would emerge from the ongoing negotiations, the passage through Montmartre is no more likely to overturn the table during the last stage, like Jean Robin (1947) and Jan Janssen ( 1968) had done it before LeMond. Marc Madiot spilled the beans last August, in L'Équipe: “It is an illusion to think that we can have the same scenario on a final stage of the Tour de France. It will be a parade, as is always the case before the Champs.”

The Olympic Games had indeed offered a wild scenario, but the circumstances were quite different, in a one-day race and with a peloton of 90 runners quickly scattered by the difficulties of the course and the disparities in level. There were 150 for the last parade on the Champs, at the arrival of the 2023 Tour. Far too many to envisage a peaceful end to the Grand Tour.

The organizers and runners have two ways to get around this traffic jam: ride at a walking pace, as Madiot suggests, or, on the contrary, completely explode the race, to lead small groups into these bottlenecks. This is neither the intention of the runners nor the organizers. For the last stage of the Tour, we parade, on the Champs or in Montmartre!