Tour 2015: Stage 7 Livarot > Fougères
STAGE FACTFougères hosted a 75 km team time trial in 1985. La Vie Claire smashed it, catapulting Bernard Hinault to the last ever French Tour victory.
It’s the stage that the farming cooperatives of France have been waiting for. Livarot, a start town for the first time in its history, is a tiny place but happens to be home to an eponymous pungent cheese of national renown. Expect plenty of aerial shots of field displays featuring tractors, hay bales and cows.
Cheese rolling
The stage, the fourth in a row to total nearly 200 km, heads back inland to deepest Normandy, featuring rolling hills, tiny hamlets (for whom the Tour is the biggest thing to happen in 20 years) and typical small rural roads. Expect a breakaway made up of French Pro Continental riders to be caught with a few kilometres to go and the stage to end in a sprint finish. Forget the mountains — this stage exemplifies the real Tour de France.
Always watch out for the quiet ones
Of course, something always happens around one week into the Tour, just when you’re least expecting it. The natural selection of the mountains is yet to settle the bunch and there are still fresh legs spinning, even if the fatigue of a week on the road begins to set in. Don’t write this stage off as nothing more than a textbook sprint finish.
Textbook sprint finish
That said, the flat finish in Fougères does indeed suit the sprinters. Cavendish & C. won’t have a chance to look up, but if they did they’d see that the town is home to a mighty medieval fortress with 13 gothic towers.
Commenti
Posta un commento