The start of the 2023 Tour in Euskadi, with all the hallmarks of Basque cycling

With a pomp worthy of the great international summits, Vitoria yesterday received the Tour de France for the presentation of the first three stages of next year’s edition, from July 1 to 3. The Grand Départ Pays Basque 2023. The Lehendakari, Iñigo Urkullu, accompanied the general director of the race, Christian Prudhomme, on the carpet of the Europa Congress Palace, escorted by the general deputies of Álava, Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia and the mayors of Gasteiz, Donostia and Bilbao, visible heads of the institutions that will make the investment of twelve million euros necessary for the landing of the biggest race in the world in Euskadi within 18 months.

In the presentation, Prudhomme revealed most of the details of the three stages, whose points of origin and destination were already known. He said that the Tour returns to the Basque Country in search of “the passion and strength of the Basque fans, who are part of the landscape of the race”, and of the classic characteristics of Basque cycling, nervous stages, without huge ports but without a metro of tranquility It is what you will have.

It will be three days online, without the usual time trial of the first days that the race usually places. The 2023 Tour will start with the Bilbao-Bilbao stage, 185 kilometers long. It will cover a large part of the Biscayan coast, from Getxo to Gernika, where it will loop through Laga and Ibarrangelu. The Tour will cross the provincial town twice, a symbol of Bizkaia and the country, before returning in search of the end of the stage in Bilbao, with the passes through Vivero and Pike as difficulties to break the peloton and prevent a massive sprint. The exact place of the goal was not revealed, but it will be uphill. The stage will have 3,300 meters of unevenness – Laukiz, San Juan de Gaztelugatxe and Morga will have passed before – “the greatest in the history of the Tour in a first stage”, he highlighted.

Jaizkibel, closer

The second stage will link Vitoria and Donostia and will be long, 210 kilometres. The race will enter Gipuzkoa through Arrasate and will advance towards Beasain, passing Udana and Aztiria. It will follow the line of the NI until turning off at Anoeta to ascend to Alkiza and return to the route after passing through Zizurkil. Hernani will be crossed and from Astigarraga the stage will head towards Oiartzun to, through Gurutze, go down to the country of Bidasoa. Crossing through Irun and heading to Hondarribia, where the Tour de France will hook up with the first years of the San Sebastian Classic to ascend to Jaizkibel via Guadalupe. Marino Lejarreta smiled in the room. His victories in the first two editions, in 1981 and 1982, came from that side of the port. From there to Donostia, a vertiginous descent and ten kilometers of flat land to seek the goal of the Antiguo area. The exact location was not specified either.

No detail of goals

The exact points of the arrivals were not detailed because the Tour has a specific work team that is in charge of the finish lines. It is this group, together with the local organizers, who decides exactly where the line will be drawn. These people will travel to the Basque Country either next week or the next. Yesterday the technical director of the event, Thierry Gouvenou, was in Vitoria.

Both parties have their preferences and it is a matter of matching those interests, those of the Tour more technical, those of local managers more in terms of promoting the territory. In that sense, it drew negative attention that the end point of the third stage was not revealed. It will be in the conurbation of Baiona, but in an ugly detail with the Basque organizers, the Tour did not reveal that point and limited itself to the fact that the race will start from Irun “towards France”.

In a political gesture, like almost everything in yesterday’s presentation, the Tour deliberately avoided mentioning the point where it will install that goal in Iparralde and thus relate it to the rest of the Basque stage layout. An omission that did not seem to be justified, since it left the picture incomplete and to some extent rebuffs the conception of this Grand Départ as a “country project” promoted by the institutions involved.

Second day in Gipuzkoa

In any case, the third stage will start from Amorebieta in search of the coast, which it will reach in Lekeitio. It will then turn east and travel along the Gipuzkoan coastline from Mutriku to Pasaia, crossing Donostia again for the second time in two days. The race will come from Orio by Igeldo.

The Gipuzkoan capital will host the Tour 31 years after the previous time, in 1992, when it organized the three-day start. The first time he arrived in San Sebastián was in 1949, when he won the Louis Caput stage. Prudhomme recalled that Caput was the director of Anquetil in the 1967 Tour, when Maître Jacques was overtaken in the prologue by José María Errandonea from Irun, who snatched the first yellow jersey from him, “to my great disappointment and that of all the Anquetilists”.

The layout of the first three stages of next year’s Tour allows us to say that the yellow jersey is going to be a demanding challenge, not suitable for all the riders in the peloton. The French test resorts to a scheme that has worked very well in recent years, complicated starts, without enormous hardness, but selective and nervous. Last year, without going any further, the first two leaders were Julian Alaphilippe and Mathieu van der Poel.

The succession of Vivero and Pike, with the final ramp at a 5.5% drop in Bilbao, is a menu for ‘puncheurs’, as Prudhomme said. For finishers. Jaizkibel is a serious port to break the peloton in the second stage, while the third seems accessible in its first section to Irun, waiting to know the kilometers through Iparralde.

In 2023 it will be 120 years since the birth of the Tour, in 1903, and it will be the twenty-fifth time that it leaves from outside France. For the second time it will do it from Euskadi. Bilbao is the tenth city south of the Pyrenees that the event visits.