Tour de France 2015: what the route means for the main contenders

After months of speculation, the Tour de France route for 2015 was announced last week – and it’s a doozy. The route will delight the climbers – Nairo Quintana and Alberto Contador will be salivating with pleasure – and anyone who thinks the individual time trial has been allowed to skew results too much in recent years. Yes, Tour de France 2012, we’re looking at you.

Time bonuses for the first week so the sprinters can play play pass the Yellow Jersey parcel? Check. Spectacular stage finish in the middle of the sea? Check. Long first week stage with cobbles? Check. Short, punchy climbs of the Mur de Huy and the Mûr de Bretagne? Check and check. The Montée Laurent Jalabert above Mende, where Laurent Jalabert had his Jour de Gloire on Bastille Day in 1995? Check. Alpe d’Huez? Check. Less than 50km of time trialling? Check.

With less than 14km of individual time trialling, next year’s Tour makes a real break with tradition. Gone is the 50+km “race of truth”. It seems no modern rider will ever have the opportunity to replicate Raymond Impanis, who won a 139km time trial in 1947 – the longest in the Tour’s history. Instead, in what looks suspiciously like the Vueltaisation of the Tour (the Amaury Sport Organisation organise both races) the individual test has had to give way to a series of tough mountain challenges. Five of the seven high mountain stages will finish in the clouds. And there are newcomers too – the climb of La Pierre Saint-Martin hits gradients of 15% over its 25km length and the Montvernier ascends a steep 4km up a cliff face in 18 torturous hairpin bends.

But as Christian Prudhomme was announcing the 2015 parcours among glitter cannons and illuminated bicycles in Paris, Chris Froome was busy putting a bomb under the entire event. Notable by his absence in the Palais des Congrès, the 2013 winner instead released a statement on his website hinting that he might not ride the 2015 race at all. Despite not attending the presentation, Team Sky had managed to steal the headlines after all.

Instead of riding the French Tour, Froome suggested he that he was considering riding the Giro before heading to Spain for a tilt at the Vuelta. It’s a double that only three riders have ever achieved: Eddy Merckx, Giovanni Battaglin and Alberto Contador. The task is easier these days with the Giro and Vuelta bookending the Tour. In Merckx and Battaglin’s day, when the Vuelta preceded the Giro, it was arguably the hardest double of them all, with the two races virtually running into each other in April and May.

For Froome, a focus on the 2015 Giro makes perfect sense. After the 17km opening team time trial, a discipline in which Sky have shown decent form, there sits at the heart of the race a perfectly formed, pan-flat individual time trial – 59.2km of pain running from Treviso to Valdobbiadene – where Froome would hope to force an advantage over expected rivals such as Contador and Vincenzo Nibali, who are both making noises about a Giro-Tour double in 2015, and defending champion Nairo Quintana. Froome is no Tony Martin – though he came close to matching the imperious German in the 2013 Tour – but relative to the other GC contenders, he is a Bradley Wiggins against the clock.

The Kenyan-born British rider – the first cyclist born on the African continent to carry off the sport’s greatest prize – has undergone a curious transformation in the media. From the silent assassin of La Toussuire – where he seemed on the verge of attacking his Yellow Jersey clad team leader, Bradley Wiggins – to the peerless all-rounder of 2013 who simply rode away from the best climbers in the world with an extraordinary, seated attack on Mont Ventoux, to a kind of Cadel Evans figure, with a better time trial than most but one who must climb at his own pace to stay in contention. His press release suggests he needs a time trial to give him an edge over the climbers, but many fans and sponsors will be hoping that Froome is merely bluffing. That the mind games that surround any Grand Tour have already begun.

Will it work against Contador? Unlikely – the Spaniard weathered the 2009 Tour when the master of psychological warfare, Lance Armstrong, unleashed the full arsenal of his dark arts against his team-mate. Nibali was criticised by team boss Alexander Vinokourov in an email that went viral. He came back and won the Tour de France. Perhaps only Quintana is vulnerable. Raised like a precious hot house flower by his Movistar team, he has been kept away from the pressure cooker of the Tour since 2013, when he finished second to Froome. But he won this year’s Giro in controversial circumstances, after appearing to ignore signals to neutralise the descent on the stormy Stelvio.

If Contador and Nibali are serious about taking up Oleg Tinkov on his indecent proposal – he’s offering €1m to the top four GC riders, Contador, Nibali, Quintana and Froome to take on all three Grand Tours next season – they will need to have spent some quality time in the wind tunnel refining their time trialling technique. The Giro pivots on that time trial stage – those less adept in the art of riding against the clock will have to deliver a tricky balancing act between burning their matches in the mountains and conserving energy for the race of truth and the final uphill tests before the Maglia Rosa rests on the shoulders of the eventual winner in Milan.

And with a scant 34 days before the Tour de France starts in Utrecht, it would take a rider with supremer mental and physical strength to navigate the challenges of a first week that looks like a compacted Spring Classics season, culminating in a later than usual team time trial on stage 9. As Contador says: “It will be important not to have lost riders in crashes or from illness, because a stage like this will be different if you have lost two riders in contrast to having a full team ready.”

The challengers for the Tour 2015 will be under no illusion that, as ever in the modern era, the rider with the best team and the best recovery will take the Yellow Jersey in Paris. But great climbers have won in the past as much for their ability against the clock as for their talent to fly when the air thins and the big men struggle. In 1958, Charly Gaul, “the Angel of the Mountains”, won every time trial in the race, on the flat and in the mountains – a total of 141km alone against the clock – and Frederico Bahamontes, “the Eagle of Toledo”, took only one stage in winning the 1959 Tour. But it was the 12km test up the Puy de Dome, the volcanic dome that rises from the meadows of the Auvergne. Bahamontes turned the GC upside down, climbing to within four seconds of the lead and hammering home the nail two days later when he pulled on the race leader’s jersey.

Tinkov’s €1m challenge may seem meaningless when Froome and his peers pull in multimillion contracts a year. But the romance of the Double can attract riders. Bradley Wiggins was lured by it, attempting the 2013 Giro before being forced to pull out through a combination of bad health, bad weather and bad luck. As a great student of the sport and its history, Wiggins was keen to line up alongside the seven riders – Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Stephen Roche, Miguel Indurain and Marco Pantani – who have worn both the Maglia Rosa and the Maillot Jaune in the same season.

No rider has ever achieved the result Tinkov’s million Euro prize is designed to produce: a Triple Crown of Grand Tour wins. Merckx and Roche came closest, taking the Double and then going on to pull on the Rainbow Stripes of World Champion. Only two riders have ever finished in the top 10 of all three Grand Tours in the same season: France’s Raphael Geminiani in 1955 and Italy’s Gastone Nocentini, who won the 1957 Giro and finished sixth in the Tour and ninth in the Vuelta. Merckx, Hinault and Contador have held all three titles within 12 months – with Merckx going one better, as ever, and taking four Grand Tours back to back, winning the Tour and the Vuelta between his 1972 and 1973 Giro triumphs.

Tinkov argues it can be done – he cites Adam Hansen’s current streak of participating in 10 Grand Tours back-to-back – but Hansen is a domestique, a workhorse with only thoughts of occasional stage glory and hauling his body around Italy, France and Spain at the service of his leader. To stay at the highest competitive level, and to be truly competitive at that level physiologically and psychologically, takes a special kind of rider – one that may not have existed since Bernard Hinault hung up his cleats.

But the Tour de France remains, for good or ill, the biggest draw in the cycling calendar. It’s the race the biggest teams and the best riders, and the all-important sponsors want to be there. It was the focus of Sir Dave Brailsford’s Sky team at its inception and he retains ambitions for reclaiming the crown in the future – perhaps even with a French rider. It’s a curious race this year, a tour of two Frances – the north and the south – with precious little in between. The north is the rough, tough cycling of the hard men, the flahutes, with its cobbles and its crosswinds and its famously variable weather. It’s the cycling of the Hell of the North and the Ardennes and the Fleche Wallonne with its iconic finish on the Mur de Huy, that deceptive little climb that ramps up to 26%, its 1,300m seemingly endless. It’s the cycling of granite-hard Brittany, that wild and windswept landscape that produced so many of the greatest cyclists from Jean Robic to Louison Bobet. It’s the land of the Badger, and Hinault will be delighted to see the Tour back on his home roads.

The race heads south after a finish on the Mûr de Bretagne, the Alpe d’Huez of Brittany, and towards the next great rendezvous in the Pyrenees. This is the France of barren and breathtaking peaks, of the Circle of Death – the Col d’Aubisque, Col du Soulor, Col du Tourmalet, Col d’Aspin and Col de Peyresourde – where the wind screams and the snow falls even in summer.

Nibali will be hoping for a repeat of the form that took him to an imperious win at Hautacam this year. It’s Contador’s favourite playground and he’ll be looking for a repeat of his 2007 win on the Plateau de Beille. Froome took his first ever Tour victory here at Ax-3-Domaines. The first rider over the Tourmalet on stage 11, as the race heads to a hilltop finish in Cauterets, will pass le Geant, the monumental statue that honours Octave Lapize – the first man ever to crest the summit – and receive the Souvenir Jacques Goddet.

A series of tough transition stages, built for the rouleurs and sprinters take the peloton east to the Alps, where Pra-Loup, la Toussuire and the Alpe d’Huez wait to decide the final destination of the Yellow Jersey. Merckx finally surrendered his Tour invincibility at Pra-Loup. Pierre Rolland signalled the French renaissance when he won at La Toussuire in 2012 with Thibaut Pinot leading home the rest of the race favourites. And the 21 lacets of the Alpe have seen some of the greatest moments in Tour history; Peter Winnen, one of the many Dutch winners on what has become the Dutch mountain said the Alpe had taken five years off his life. It’s not the prettiest or hardest mountain out there but the penultimate stage of the race – at a swift 110km, it’s being billed as “100km of drama!” – might just see a rider pinch the Tour from under the leader’s nose, as Carlos Sastre did in 2008 when he overhauled team-mate Frank Schleck to take the Yellow Jersey and hold it to Paris.

But we still won’t see the best women in the world duking it out in the big mountains. La Course is back on the Champs Elysees, a tasty warm-up to the finale of the Tour on that hallowed boulevard. The Vuelta are making noises about running a similar one-day race on the last stage of the 2015 event. There are encouraging reports that ASO are looking for an American sponsor for a week-long women’s stage race to take place over some of the same stages as the men’s race. But not this year.

A mountainous parcours with plenty for the sprinters and the puncheurs. The pendulum has swung away from the seeming sterility of the lengthy solo effort to the old days of sweat and grit. To riders going mano a mano, playing chess on wheels at 6,000 feet. Contador and Quintana will be desperate to leave their names on one of the 21 hairpins of the Alpe; Nibali will want to defend his crown and prove that he deserved his 2014 title. Whether any or all of them come into the Tour in a position to try for that elusive, extraordinary Double and take home some or all of Tinkov’s million dollar jackpot remains to be seen. As for Froome, the decision to skip the Tour may be out of his hands – Brailsford is under attack from Brian Cookson for failing to develop British talent and sponsors may leave him no option.

They don’t call the Tour La Petite Reine for nothing.

• This article appeared first on 100 Tours 100 Tales
• Follow Suze Clemitson on Twitter
• Follow Guardian Sport on Facebook