Tour de France 'comes home' as 2025 route unveiled

Paris: The 2025 Tour de France will be raced exclusively in France for the first time since the 2020 Covid edition with the 21 stages including two ti...

Paris: The 2025 Tour de France will be raced exclusively in France for the first time since the 2020 Covid edition with the 21 stages including two time-trials, a blockbuster final week in the Alps and a return to the Champs-Elysees finale.

After successive starts outside France in Copenhagen in 2022, Bilbao in 2023 and Florence in 2024, the 2025 Grand Depart is in the northern French city of Lille, with fans expected to flood over the nearby Belgian border.

"We decided to bring the Tour home, it was high time after all the foreign starts," race director Christian Prudhomme said.

Entirely absent from the 2024 route due to the Olympics, the 2025 edition has eight stages in the North and West and ends with eight laps along the cobbles of the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

The Olympics enjoyed a huge success with a long, arduous race around Paris but organisers said it was too soon for the Tour to attempt that.