A1. The climb is the Col d’Izoard (2,360 metres), in the Hautes-Alpes department of southeastern France. Just below the summit on the southern ascent lies the Casse Déserte — literally the “broken desert” — a landscape of bare scree and eroded limestone pinnacles so otherworldly that many compare it to Martian terrain. The memorial within the Casse Déserte honours two of the dominant Tour riders of the post-war era: the Italian Fausto Coppi, who won the Tour de France in 1949 and 1952 and launched race-defining attacks on the Izoard in both editions, and the Frenchman Louison Bobet, who led the race over the Izoard three times and won the Tour in 1953, 1954, and 1955 — the first man to win three consecutive editions. The Izoard first appeared in the Tour in 1922, and organisers have used it more than thirty times since, its barren upper slopes providing one of the most distinctive landscapes in all of professional cycling.
A2. The rider was Eugène Christophe, a Frenchman who held the virtual race lead when his fork snapped on the descent of the Tourmalet during Stage 6 of the 1913 Tour. Tour rules of the era prohibited any outside assistance — the rider alone was responsible for his own equipment. Christophe shouldered his broken bicycle and walked more than ten kilometres down the mountainside to the village of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, weeping with anger as rival after rival passed him on the road. At the village blacksmith’s forge, owned by a man named Monsieur Lecomte, Christophe spent hours repairing the fork himself under the watchful eyes of race officials who ensured no one helped him. He did, however, allow the blacksmith’s young assistant to work the bellows of the forge — and for this infraction, race officials later docked him ten minutes. He lost two hours in total and had no realistic chance of winning the Tour. Many people have re-enacted and commemorated Christophe’s story since; a plaque and statue in Sainte-Marie-de-Campan mark the spot to this day.
A3. The mountain is Mont Ventoux — the “Giant of Provence” or the “Bald Mountain” — which rises in solitary grandeur from the plains of the Vaucluse to 1,912 metres, its upper slopes stripped of vegetation by the wind and bleached a ghostly white by the limestone. During Stage 13 of the 1967 Tour de France, on a day of extreme heat, British rider Tom Simpson — the 1965 world champion and the most celebrated British cyclist of his generation — collapsed approximately two kilometres from the summit. He had been suffering from a stomach illness and was already weakened. Despite his team mechanic Harry Hall’s desperate attempts to persuade him to stop, Simpson remounted and rode a short distance further before collapsing unconscious, his hands locked to the handlebars. A helicopter airlifted him to hospital in Avignon, but doctors pronounced him dead that afternoon. The post-mortem found amphetamines and alcohol in his system, factors widely cited as contributing to his death alongside the heat, the climb, dehydration, and illness. Simpson was twenty-nine years old. A memorial near the spot where he fell has become a place of pilgrimage for cyclists from around the world, who leave water bottles, bidons, and other tributes there. The tragedy prompted race organisers to introduce drug testing at the Tour de France the following year.
A4. The mountain is the Col du Tourmalet, at 2,115 metres the highest paved road in the central Pyrenees and the most frequently visited climb in Tour de France history. The scout was Alphonse Steinès, a journalist and organiser at L’Auto, the newspaper that ran the Tour. Determined to convince Desgrange to route the 1910 race through the Pyrenees, Steinès set out in January to survey the Tourmalet — snow-covered, unpaved, and effectively impassable. His car became stuck in a snowdrift; he abandoned it, lost his way on foot, fell into a stream, and a local rescue party eventually found him exhausted and nearly frozen. Once he had thawed out, he dispatched his famous telegram: “Traversé Tourmalet. Très bonne route. Parfaitement praticable.” — “Crossed Tourmalet. Very good road. Perfectly passable.” The road was nothing of the sort. When news of the planned Pyrenean stage reached the peloton, more than two dozen riders promptly withdrew from the race. From 1919 to 1939, the Tourmalet featured in every edition of the race except 1922, when organisers rerouted to avoid heavy snowfall. No single climb has done more to define the Pyrenean character of the Tour de France.
A5. The Col du Galibier, topping out at 2,642 metres in the French Alps, was Henri Desgrange’s personal favourite and the climb that drew his most purple prose. When the Tour first included it in 1911, it was the highest point any Tour rider had ever reached, and Desgrange’s response in print was rapturous — declaring that before this “giant,” every other climb was as insipid as dishwater. On the first day riders tackled it, during a brutal 366-kilometre stage from Chamonix to Grenoble, most of them walked at least part of the climb on their single-speed bicycles. Organisers erected the monument to Desgrange on the mountain’s southern side in 1949, and a wreath drapes it every time the Tour crosses the summit. The Souvenir Henri Desgrange prize — a cash award — goes annually to the first rider over the highest mountain in that year’s race, which is frequently the Galibier itself.
A6. The climb is La Planche des Belles Filles, a short but ferocious ascent of 5.9 kilometres averaging 8.5 percent, rising through the Vosges Mountains of eastern France near the town of Plancher-les-Mines. Its name — “the plank of the beautiful girls” — derives from a legend (almost certainly apocryphal) that the young women of the nearby village threw themselves into a mountain lake in 1635 to escape an invading force of Swedish mercenaries; etymologists believe the name actually derives from an old dialect word for beech trees (fahys). The climb made its Tour debut in 2012, when a young Chris Froome won the stage in a display of climbing power that announced him as a future Tour contender, even as his team-mate Bradley Wiggins took the yellow jersey. In the penultimate stage of the 2020 Tour — a time trial finishing atop La Planche des Belles Filles — Slovenian rider Tadej Pogačar, then just twenty-one years old, delivered what many consider the most astonishing single ride in modern Tour history, overturning a deficit of nearly a minute on compatriot and race leader Primož Roglič to seize the yellow jersey on the final competitive day of the general classification. Pogačar went on to win the Tour in Paris the following day.
A7. The rider was Octave Lapize, who would go on to win the 1910 Tour de France overall. Stage 10, from Luchon to Bayonne, was a 326-kilometre monster that crossed five mountain passes — Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet, Soulor, and Aubisque — the combination known as the “Circle of Death.” Lapize was near the summit of the final climb, the Col d’Aubisque, when he turned on the race officials gathered there and let fly his famous cry: “Vous êtes des assassins!” — “You are murderers!” The roads were unpaved, the bicycles were heavy single-speeds, and the riders had been climbing for the better part of fifteen hours. Lapize’s outburst became the founding myth of Pyrenean cycling. Seven years later, in 1917, an enemy aircraft shot down Lapize during World War I.
A8. The climb is the Puy de Dôme, a 1,465-metre volcanic summit in the Auvergne that the Tour first visited in 1952 and used regularly through the 1970s and 1980s. Its most celebrated moment came on Stage 19 of the 1964 Tour, when Jacques Anquetil — already a four-time Tour champion and the race leader — and Raymond Poulidor, the great nearly-man of French cycling, rode elbow-to-elbow up the final kilometres of the climb in a duel so intense that neither would yield an inch of road to the other. Poulidor eventually drew away near the summit, taking time back on Anquetil, but not enough to overturn the deficit; Poulidor finished second overall, just 55 seconds behind in Paris. Anquetil went on to win his fifth and final Tour. The image of the two riders pressed together, neither able to look at the other, became one of the iconic photographs of twentieth-century sport. The climb disappeared from the Tour after 1988 when a dispute over access rights to the summit road — which runs through protected national park land — prevented organisers from using it. It returned at last in 2023, after thirty-five years away, finishing a stage won by Canadian rider Michael Woods; the occasion drew enormous crowds and considerable emotion, given how long the mountain had been absent from the race.
A9. The mountain is Alpe d’Huez, rising above the Romanche valley in the French Alps. In 1952 it hosted the Tour’s first-ever summit finish, when the great Italian champion Fausto Coppi — il Campionissimo — stormed up the unpaved ascent on Stage 10, a 266-kilometre stage starting in Lausanne. Coppi completed the climb in 45 minutes and 22 seconds, a record that stood until 1989, seized the yellow jersey, and never relinquished it. The climb then lay dormant in the Tour for 24 years, returning only in 1976. Since then it has become a near-permanent fixture. Race organisers number each of the twenty-one hairpins from bottom to top (21 to 1) and post a sign at each one naming the stage winner or winners associated with it. When the number of Tour winners on the mountain eventually exceeded twenty-one, organisers began doubling up names on individual hairpin signs. Today the cycling world regards the climb as the most famous ascent in professional cycling.
A10. The Col de l’Iseran, at 2,764 metres, is the highest paved mountain pass in the Alps. It connects Val-d’Isère to the north with Bonneval-sur-Arc to the south in the Savoie department near the Italian border, and snow closes it for much of the year. The Tour first used it in 1938, over a road workers had opened only the previous year and not yet fully surfaced; Belgian Félicien Vervaecke was first over the summit, though Gino Bartali passed him on the descent and went on to win the Tour in Paris. In 1939 the Iseran hosted the Tour’s first-ever mountain time trial. The pass has appeared only a handful of times in the Tour’s modern era; in 2019, a hailstorm and landslide made the road impassable mid-descent, forcing officials to halt the stage; they froze times at the summit for GC purposes, which handed Egan Bernal the yellow jersey from Julian Alaphilippe — though the race jury ruled that officials would declare no stage winner. The highest point the Tour de France has ever reached is not the Iseran but the Cime de la Bonette loop, which tops out at around 2,802 metres and has appeared five times: 1962, 1964, 1993, 2008, and 2024.
