Tour de France: Stage 15: Gap to L'Alpe d'Huez
July 18th 2006 01:24
Bonjour tout le monde!!!
Results for Stage 14: Cadel Evans finished 10th in Sunday’s stage, which saw him maintain 5th place overall. Michael Rogers is still hanging in there in 8th place. Robbie McEwen still has the sprinters’ jersey in an almost unassailable lead.
After that well deserved rest day yesterday, the riders for the 2006 Tour de France are off again today. Stage 15 is 187 kilometres long and is a notorious mountain stage. It starts at Gap (785 metres above sea level) and ends at L’Alpe d’Huez, which can be found at 1850 metres above sea level: a climb of 1065 metres over 187 kilometres!!!
The finish line for the stage at l'Alpe d'Huez (picture is public domain and can be found at wikipedia.org)
Because I told you about Gap in my last post, today I will give you a quick tour of L’Alpe d’Huez. L’Alpe d’Huez is a famous ski resort and mountain in the Central French Alps in the Isère department.
According to Wikipedia, it is probably one of the most mountain climbs in the Tour de France. Although the route differs slightly each year, l’Alpe d’Huez has hosted a Stage finish basically every year since 1976. The notorious climb is 13.8 kilometres long at an average gradient of 8.1% around 21 hairpin bends. My calf muscles are hurting just thinking about it!!! The bends are shown in the photograph below… On each of those bends, the local authorities have made panelling, recognising the winners of this stage from each year since 1976.
The climb and hair pin bends up to l'Alpe d'Huez (picture is licensed under Creative Commons agreement and can be found at wikipedia.org)
Over the past 10 years, the stage finish has been incredibly crowded and chaotic. Can you believe in 1999, one over-zealous fan stepped into the path of Italian Giuseppe Guerini causing a crash, just because he wanted to take a photo? Amazingly though, Guerini still won the stage. Some fans have even tried to push their favourite riders to the top!
However, l’Alpe d’Huez has many more attractions than just the Tour each year. It also is the finish for La Marmotte: a one day 175 kilometre ride with over 5000 metres of climbing. It also hosts downhill skiing competitions.
The profile of Stage 15 (picture is licensed under GNU agreement and can be found at wikipedia.org)
As I said at the beginning, l’Alpe d’Huez is also a fashionable ski resort. If you click here, this will take you to l’Alpe d’Huez’s official ski resort website. It will give you all the info you need.
That’s it for today. See you tomorrow
À demain
Melinda
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