Tour de France 2025, first three stages unveiled

Tour de France 2025, presented the first three stages

The “Grand Départ” of the Tour de France 2025, in Lille and the Hauts-de-France, will be fertile ground for the sprinters, who are expected to vie for the first yellow jersey. È what emerges from the presentation of the route of the first stages unveiled todayì just in Lille.

The first stage, a 185-kilometer circuit around Lille on July 5, 2025, and the third, a 172-kilometer stage between Valenciennes and Dunkirk, after the trend è in recent years to start the race with hilly stages, should smile on the sprint specialists, although there will be in both the Mont Cassel, tackled on two different sides.

"It will be the first time in half a dozen years that a sprinter will be able to win the first yellow jersey”, said Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour de France, during the presentation of the 'great start'.

The climbers will be able to measure themselves in the second stage, between Lauwin-Planque and Boulogne-sur-Mer (209 kilometers), with two climbs in the last ten kilometers, the Saint-Etienne-au-Mont coast (900 m at 11 percent) and then the Outreau coast (800 m at 8.8 percent). The general classification favorites will have to be on their guard already in the finale, "absolutely formidable" according to Christian Prudhomme.

This “Grand Départ”, the first in France since 2021, will be the fifth in the Hauts-de-France after Lille, already twice (1960, 1994), Roubaix in 1969 and Dunkirk in 2001. "We could not return to France in the places that did not viscerally love cycling and the Tour de France,” Prudhomme stressed, “We had to return to a land that breathes, that feels emotions, a land of conviviality. È a land that breathes cycling".