INTERVIEW
Ask the program ... it is Tuesday at noon that the organizers of the Tour de France will unveil the course of the 2020 edition. But what we already know is that the race will experience an unprecedented Col de la Loze, located at 2.403 meters above sea level, above the resort of Méribel. A real blow to the station, which claimed a new arrival "in recent years", according to Thierry Monin, Mayor of Meribel-Les Allues, inevitably delighted by the news.
"We had received the Tour de France in 1973, where Bernard Thévenet had won this stage under a very big storm," said the elected on Europe 1. "Since then, we have renewed our candidacy and I know that there is as every year many cities that require an arrival stage and that it is not always easy ", smiles Thierry Monin.
Giant slide
And what took away the piece is this new route. "Méribel had become a climb without too much interest in the mountains, with a final at 1,700 meters, and there we proposed a new arrival at 2,300 meters", confirms Thierry Monin. Great novelty of the next Tour, the narrow ribbon of bitumen marries the asperities of the ground on the last 7 kilometers. Like a giant toboggan on a roller coaster, it multiplies the ruptures of slope, which makes little significant its average slope however very high.
"This greenway is a road that was embedded, it is an existing road, a service track for the construction and maintenance of ski lifts and which also served as a ski slope connecting Courchevel to Méribel", details the city council.