The day of the unveiling of the next years Tour de France route is a double edged sword for me. It's always exciting to see what the new route is going to be, to see what parts of France they'll visit, what mountains they'll climb and from it all decipher what kind of contender it suits best. On the other hand it's like a kid getting to see his Christmas present in March before it's put away again for the next nine months.
Yesterday the route for the 2014 Tour de France was released, but there's little point me banging on about how great it looks and how excited I am for next July. I say that virtually every year because there's no such thing as a bad Tour de France. That is unless the organisors decided to skip the mountains altogether and give us twenty-one stages of bunch sprints. Mark Cavendish might beg to differ, however.
The 101st edition of the race will begin on Saturday, July 5th from England as we already knew -- the first three stages in Britain had already been announced some months before -- and will cover 21 stages for a total distance of 3,656 kilometres. There's nine flat stages in all, five hilly stages, six mountain stages, one 54-kilometre time-trial, two rest days, and nine new stage cities.