This Could Be 2024’s MOST DECISIVE Tour de France Stage…

Stage nine of the 2024 Tour de France promises to be one of the most exciting of the race. It’s a 199km loop that starts and ends in Troyes which takes in the gravel roads of the Champagne region. It’ll feature 14 gravel sectors, totalling 32km. CW’s cycling brothers James and Stephen Shrubsall headed over to France to check out the route.

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[Music] hi welcome to the champagne country in France we I have just ridden Stage Nine of this year’s tour to France it’s a pretty gritty stage that has been basically based on strad banke and we are at the top of a hill about halfway through the stage is called the coat Dev Alon and we think this is where it’s all going to start kicking off that has got to stay [Music] in so Stage Nine has been earmarked by lot of the DS’s as one of the sort of more significant stages of this year’s tour purely because of the amount of off-roading that’s involved we rode this route yesterday and counted up about 31 km of gravel sections we can concur it should be a game changer I think it’s fair to say that this stage is unlikely to win any rid of the tour to France overall but it you know with the gravel sectors and as we’ve seen they they’re bit dicey in places pretty rough lots of tight turns and lots of loose gravel you know it could easily end someone’s tour to France even if they don’t crush out you know you lose a few minutes on a stage like this when it’s all kind of kicking off as you can see it’s really steep down there um you’re in the wrong end of the race when a move goes then you know that could be your GC hopes over I mean I compare it very much to the strad biani and Tuscany it’s a similar amount of climbing with a similar amount of gravel sections over a similar distance it’s going to make for uh some pretty entertaining viewing it’s a stage of two halves really so as you roll out of twap you know really heavily undulates for the first 30 miles or so then it starts getting a bit more spiky and just when you think the hard work’s done the gravel une Earths itself does it not it does yeah and the first gravel section it comes at a kind of little angle off to the road they’re going to be going really fast at that point and it’s quite an interesting running so I think there’s going to be quite a few nervous Riders you know this is a sort of stage that’s going to be well suited to anyone comfortable riding on the cobbles kind of ruet type Rider yeah well having ridden this gravel um you know every sector of it I think the worst of it is like the equivalent of maybe a three star sector of parve in the par rubo I mean there’s nothing awful but every now and then you get a surprise thrown up where there’s a sort of stray rock or you know a really sort of deep section of gravel which you could potentially you know lose a wheel in or get a puncture or whatever it’s interesting and they’ve they’ve obviously used France’s Champagne region as opposed to the olive growths of Tuscany to replicate that well I have to say this area really looks like TUS some you know sometimes it just looks like you know Tuscany brocher really it’s quite amazingly similar although some of the roads as we were talking about yesterday some of those surfaces are really quite gnarly um it’s sort of place you really don’t want to crash so the stones are kind of poking through and uh yeah it’s going to smart if anyone falls off on those which Unfortunately they probably are going to there’s a lot of little technical pieces yeah having ridden straw biani before um I can honestly say that I think it’s a little bit more rustic than gravel roads in Tuscany purely I think because there hasn’t been a grandol ridden over them or a classic race ridden over them yeah I get the impression these aren’t necessarily particularly well-used tracks a lot of them are kind of farm tracks run around the edges of fields valleys kind of up and down Vineyards there’s a huge variety of different characters in these tracks and and in the route itself actually yeah so after yeah we said it initially rolls then it spikes up and down for a bit then you you know you see you know the white roads behind us and whereabouts are we now James this is C develon and it comes about 107 km into the stage so that’s about halfway through and this to be honest with you is the first opportunity anyone with designs on winning the stage is going to have to make a move and try and make it stick hopefully you get an idea behind this that this is a really steep little kicker is comparable to anything I’d say in and tour of Flanders um any any Rider that excels there going enjoy this it registered about 20% at the end there on my ging so I think it’s about a mile of gravel then because it’s so steep I think they’ve had to tarmac it so as James said I think you know this is going to be a decisive point of the route where if anyone you know has designs on winning the stage they’re going to go at the bottom down there and then it continues with um another SE of gravel around the corner so yeah I think we’re sitting where the action will take place yeah I don’t know how open it’s going to be because it’s only accessible by gravel roads hopefully you’re going to be able to get here cuz this would be a brilliant place to watch the race yeah so we’re at the top here now which we’ve sort of decided between us is probably going to be the pivotal moment of the stage we’re sitting here Move Yourself fast forward to July the 7th who’s coming up this hill first got to say you know thinking this uh all yesterday this stage is pretty much custom built for Matthew vandero I hate to make kind of stringent predictions but if you were going to predict one Rider I think you know that would be him I mean he he will spend quite a lot of the race looking after um Jasper Phillipson his teammate in the Sprints but I’m sure he’d like to get a stage for himself and I am positive he will have this one at least in the back of his mind everything about it suits him well you know there’s rough technical roads punchy climbs hard climbs like this one you know pretty short but someone like Vander Paul with all the power he’s got can make a real difference yeah this isn’t the only one of these this is probably where it’s going to kick off but another 10 miles down the road 16ks there’s another one and it’s actually even harder it’s um this is that’s full gravel very steep the sectors come thick and fast as you reach the the finish of you’re going into the final third they come thick and fast and you know the these two big climbs are going to make the difference but then those sectors those t those technical tracks are going to be somewhere where a guy that’s got great bite handling can actually make that Gap stick so a quick recap July the 7th Stage Nine tour to France TWA to TWA 199 km with about 7,000 ft of climbing get yourself over here if you want to see an amazing bike race in an amazing part of France