Prudy Project

Daniel, François and Richard unpack the 2025 Tour de France routes in our latest episode

Every time the Tour de France route is unveiled and I watch the fly-over graphic zooming round France and zig-zagging through the mountains, my mind’s eye sees a slideshow of fragmented memories from past editions.

Lille, where Chris Boardman won the yellow jersey on his first day in the Tour de France 30 years ago with a record-breaking average speed in a time trial. Dunkirk, scene of the smallest grand départ I’ve ever witnessed in 2001. Mur de Bretagne, where Dan Martin bobbed his way to the stage win on the Tour’s last visit in 2018. Châteauroux, where Mark Cavendish won his first, 17th and 32nd stages. Could it be the scene of yet another victory? His presence at the route unveiling in Paris might just put a light pencil mark in the ‘maybe’ column to counter his firmer suggestion that he’s done with the Tour after winning his record-breaking 35th stage this year.

After all, Cavendish, like all the sprinters, would relish the opening week – a chance to take the yellow jersey on the opening day in Lille and a healthy handful of other opportunities before a mountainous second half to the race. The whole opening week is reminiscent of the 2006 race, ironically the final one of Jean Marie Leblanc’s rein before he handed over the race directorship to Christian Prudhomme.

The mountains shape the race for the yellow jersey, of course, and there’s an intriguing finish on Bastille Day at Mont-Dore in the Massif Central before the rest day, which comes after 10 stages rather than nine to ensure there’s racing on the French national holiday.

As a result the middle week is short and difficult, with back-to-back-to-back mountain stages. Hautacam, followed by a mountain time trial to the altiport at Peyragudes – where François stole my last piece of black pudding a few years ago – and then Superbagnères, which means a lot to viewers of my vintage who remember Greg LeMond and Robert Millar winning there in 1986 and 1989 respectively. Those Pyrenean stages are flanked by the two cassoulet days, in Toulouse and Carcassonne.

Then it’s over to Mont Ventoux, which brings back so many memories for me, from my first visit on a family holiday as a teenager where we stopped to see the Tom Simpson memorial and I collected a piece of the mountain’s lunar-style rock as a souvenir. Then subsequent visits in a professional capacity, including seeing Marco Pantani and Lance Armstrong roll past side-by-side on the infamous ‘no gifts’ stage in 2000 and the unforgettable 2016 stage when high winds meant the finish was brought down to Chalet-Reynard, condensing the crowd, and causing the freak incident that saw Chris Froome running up the road sans vélo. That year, before the Tour’s drama, I made an episode for Friends of the Podcast called Mont Ventoux: Heat, Wind and Fear which is still one of my favourite things I’ve done.

A couple of weeks ago when I was writing about Tadej Pogačar and comparing his exploits this year to Eddy Merckx, a quote from a legendary darts commentator – Sid Waddell on this occasion, not Ned Boulting – kept going round in my head. He once said of the icon of the oche, Eric Bristow: ‘When Alexander of Macedon was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer. Eric Bristow is only 27.’

I kept thinking about that line in relation to Pogačar but decided not to use it because the Slovenian does still have significant gaps on his palmarès. Winning a Tour stage at Mont Ventoux is one of them, but next year’s race will give him that opportunity.

With the Champs-Élysées reinstated after a year’s mini-break in Nice so Paris could accommodate the Olympic Games, the race will mark the 50th anniversary of the first finish on the famous cobbled boulevard. As ever with the Tour there is history waiting to be written. Project Prudy 2025 looks to me, at first glance, a sort of cut-and-shut route combining elements of the Tour de France identity he inherited from Leblanc and the one he and Thierry Gouvenou have shaped in the past decade or so. A steady opening owes everything to the geography of northern France, of course, but the by-product is that perhaps it will repel the flames of a first-week Pogcineration. The Caen time trial looks similar to the 2021 one to Laval where Pog laid his first marker of that edition but it’s probably not enough to put the race beyond everyone else. The second half is a classic 21st century Prudy Tour, with short, explosive stages to encourage the sort of dynamic racing and long-range hostilities we’ve become accustomed to in recent years.

All that is nine months away and history tells us that anything can happen in that time. But the route is drawn, the Tour is the Tour, so let the speculation begin.

Listen to Daniel, François and Richard dissect the 2025 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes routes in this week’s episode. The Cycling Podcast Féminin will be back next week with an in-depth look at the women’s race.

The Class of ’04: Coming soon for Friends of the Podcast

Our next KM0 episode for Friends of the Podcast subscribers marks the 20th anniversary of the British Cycling Academy, created in 2004 when a group of promising young riders were recruited to live in student-style flats in Manchester with the chance to pursue their dreams of making it as professional cyclists.

The parallels with the Class of ’92, which developed at Manchester United, a few miles across the city, and which included David Beckham and a cohort of footballers who helped the club dominate English football, are striking.

That first intake included a future Tour de France champion (Geraint Thomas), the Tour’s record-breaking stage winner (Mark Cavendish) and a multiple Olympic champion (Ed Clancy). Between them they collected enough rainbow jerseys to fill a wardrobe too and paved the way for successive generations of British riders to follow in their tracks, although the Academy soon relocated to warmer, sunnier Tuscany, leaving the grit and grey of Manchester winters behind.

This episode tells the story of the early days of ‘The Academy’, founded and run by Rod Ellingworth. We also hear from some of the riders who didn’t quite reach the heights of Thomas, Cavendish and Clancy but nevertheless learned lessons about life and sport.

This is the latest episode of KM0 for Friends of the Podcast subscribers. A subscription gives access to an archive of more than 300 episodes released since 2015 and the financial support makes a huge contribution towards enabling us to cover the grand tours on-the-ground with daily episodes free-for-all.

Richard Moore enters the British Cycling hall of fame

Our late friend and co-founder Richard Moore was posthumously inducted into the British Cycling hall of fame at a ceremony held in Manchester at the weekend.

The British Cycling hall of fame was created in 2009 and now has more than 80 members, all of whom have achieved greatness in elite level competition or have served the British cycling community in some significant way.

Richard was one of 13 new inductees this year. The others were Laura Kenny, Jason Kenny, Bradley Wiggins, Ed Clancy, Joanna Rowsell, Dani Rowe, Aileen McGlynn, Shanaze Reade, Tracy Moseley, Carole Gosling, Carole Leigh and Mike Jardine.

We were incredibly proud to hear that Richard was to be inducted and, as Daniel said in this week’s episode, the honour recognises his contribution to the sport not only in his role as a journalist but also as a rider.

Every now and then we used to pull Richard’s leg about his cycling career, which he always took in very good spirits – I suspect because he knew he didn’t have anything to prove to Daniel or me, and because deep down he recognised early on that his deepest talents and passion lay elsewhere, in writing.

Recently I re-listened to Introducing Richard Moore – part of a series in which we interviewed each other about our various introductions to cycling and journalism. I can remember my scepticism when Richard suggested we do this series – in the wrong hands it could have been self-indulgent – but, as was often the case, Richard’s judgement was fine-tuned. Orla Chennaoui interviewed Richard and in that episode he talked about how he got into journalism while still a rider.

Richard rode the Tour de Langkawi, PruTour and Commonwealth Games for Scotland in 1998 but by that stage he already had his sights on a career in journalism.

And it was as a journalist that he excelled. Richard’s books on cycling included In Search of Robert Millar, Slaying the Badger, Sky’s The Limit, and Étape. They all trod the delicate line between ushering newcomers into the complex worlds of road or track cycling and satisfying experts who’d been following the sport for years. His writing demystified and explained the nuances without dumbing anything down. He gave his readers – and our listeners – the credit for being able to keep up or catch up, and his journalism was accessible without being in any way superficial.

The Cycling Podcast, which Richard, Daniel and I created together in 2013, is an enormous part of Richard’s legacy and made his voice familiar to hundreds of thousands of listeners. Everyone at The Cycling Podcast would like to thank British Cycling for recognising Richard’s contribution because the thing that underpinned all his work was a deep love of cycling.

The beautiful game on two wheels

I was watching the Scottish Premiership match between Aberdeen and Rangers earlier this week (sorry to all the footballphobes out there) when a couple of cycling connections that didn’t make the Tour d’Écosse series came to mind.

When Simon and I visited Ibrox, the home of Rangers in Glasgow, it was pouring with rain and we were running out of daylight. We’d also missed the cut-off to visit the club’s museum and trophy room, not that we’d have felt very comfortable clacking round in our cycling shoes and soaking wet kit.

I didn’t know at the time that we missed the chance to see a bit of cycling memorabilia because among the silverware and other mementos of the club’s history in the wood-panelled trophy room is a bicycle.

Apparently, there have been a lot of conflicting stories about how the bike came to be at Ibrox in the first place, with some saying it dates to the 1930s, others to the 1950s, although all agree it was a gift from a visiting club. Some even said it was a bike ridden by a Tour de France winner who supported St Etienne, but that seems unlikely considering it has mudguards and a rack for panniers.

From looking at a photo of the bike, the most plausible of the possible explanations is that it was a gift from St Etienne, who Rangers met in a European Cup tie in November 1975, which is backed up by a newspaper cutting I found while doing a bit of internet sleuthing.

The 1975 Tour was won by Bernard Thévenet, of course, although I can find no evidence to say he’s a St Etienne supporter, although they were the dominant club in French football at the time so I suppose it’s possible.

The bike was made by Manufrance, a St Etienne company and one of the major sponsors of the city’s football team in 1975-76. However, no one has ever won the Tour on a Manufrance bike. The company – full name Manufacture Française d’Armes et Cycles – specialised in more utilitarian bikes and touring bikes, many of which were sold in mail-order catalogues. So it seems that the bike was a gift from an executive at the club’s sponsors Manufrance who travelled to Ibrox for the Rangers v St Etienne match.

When Manufrance ran into trouble in the late 1970s, French businessman Bernard Tapie (yes, him again!) tried to buy the ailing company but he was rebuffed. Instead, Tapie bought the French chain of health food shops, La Vie Claire, and eventually created the cycling team as a promotional vehicle for the company. Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond both went on to win the Tour de France in La Vie Claire colours.

Meanwhile, when Aberdeen beat Dundee in the 1995 Coca-Cola Cup final at Glasgow’s Hampden Park the man of the match, Stephen Glass, was presented with a red Coca-Cola-branded mountain bike complete with a disc wheel that does not look UCI-compliant. For many years the bike lived in storage at Aberdeen’s Pittodrie ground until it was auctioned for charity a few years ago. Apparently Glass has been asked about the unusual man-of-the-match award so often in interviews that he got a bit fed up talking about it.

Anyway, all this meandering Scottish football-related trivia is my ham-fisted way of shoehorning in a reminder that the 15-part Tour d’Écosse series, released two years ago this week and telling the story of my journey with Simon taking in the country’s football grounds on two wheels is perfect off-season listening and is still on our feed.

The series won its category at the inaugural Sports Podcast Awards and the feedback from listeners was incredibly warm and very touching – even from the footballphobes out there!