Cycling in Yorkshire
Cycling in Yorkshire
Stage 21 of the Tour de France 2023 is a 115.1km flat stage from Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines to Paris Champs-Elysées.
The reason for starting in Saint-Quentin is that at the 2024 Paris Olympics, most of the cycling events will be held in Yvelines.
The Tour de France finishes with the traditional sprint on the Champs-Elysées.
Will Jasper Philipsen round off his Tour with a win in Paris, or will someone else - Dylan Groenewegn, for example - beat him?
These are video highlights of Stage 21 Tour de France 2023.
This is the Stage 21 TDF 2023 Blog.
Race Details | Poll | Map & Profile | Timings | Videos | Food & Drink | Route Notes | Favourites
| Date | Sunday 23rd July 2023 |
|---|---|
| Stage classification | Flat |
| Distance | 115.1km |
| Intermediate sprint | Paris Haut des Champs-Elysées |
| Climbs | Côte du Pavé des Gardes |
This is a poll where you can vote for some of the main contenders to win Stage 21.
This is a map of Stage 21 Tour de France 2023.
This is a zoom-able map of the route of Stage 21 of the Tour de France 2023.
This is the profile of Stage 21 Tour de France 2023.
| Caravan | Fast Schedule | Slow Schedule | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start Time (départ fictif) | 1430 |
1630 |
1630 |
| Start time (départ réel) |
1440 |
1640 |
1640 |
| Champs-Elysées for the 1st time | 1615 |
1806 |
1815 |
| Intermediate Sprint | 1640 |
1830 |
1840 |
| Finish Line Le Champs-Elysées (115km) | 1747 |
1928 |
1947 |
This video shows the route of Stage 21 of the 2023 Tour de France.
These are the highlights of the final stage in 2022.
Let's start with breakfast. The baguette is based on Viennese
bread, adopted in Paris in the 1800s. Similarly, the croissant
is a Viennese pastry made in Austrian bakeries that opened in Paris
in the 1830s.
Cheeses from the Parisian region are mainly bries, for example from Meaux or Melun.
The Opéra is a cake created by a Parisian pastry chef in 1955. It has layers of sponge and coffee-flavoured cream and ganache, and is topped with chocolate. The chef's wife thought it looked a bit like the stage of the Opéra Garnier in Paris, hence its name.
Macarons are also associated with Paris. Honey is made in Paris by bees in hives on roofs - for example on the roof of the Musée d'Orsay.
There's a thriving beer-making scene in Paris.
Since it's the last day of the 2023 Tour de France, champagne is in order - albeit the riders will probably settle for pizza and beer.
Stage 21 starts in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines at the Vélodrome National (départ fictif).
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines is a new town built from the 1960s onwards. It is named after the Etang de Saint-Quentin (St Quentin's Pond).
Europcar and Bouygues Construction have premises in Saint-Quentin.
Le Golf National is here, and it hosted the 2018 Ryder Cup.
Until 2019, Saint-Quentin was the start and finish point of the Paris-Brest-Paris cycle race.
The Vélodrome was built from 2011 to 2014, and it has already hosted major events. Next to it is a BMX track. Saint-Quentin will host cycling events at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
The départ réel is at Fontenay-le-Fleury.
Stage 21 circles round through Les Clayes-sur-Bois and Elancourt, going past France Miniature (small-scale Eiffel Tower etc) and La Commanderie des Templiers.
It passes the Golf National and the Technocentre Renault at Guyancourt and continues to Versailles.
The Palais de Versailles is much too big. It was built by a king with an oversized ego. It is furnished and decorated in horrendous taste. It's far too busy, and if you visit you'll spend all your time either queuing up or jostling with thousands of other people on the way round part of the house. There is a distinct smell of stale pee in most of the rooms.
Don't let me put you off visiting the gardens though. You can hire a rowing boat or a bike, or you can bring your own bike and ride round. The sorbet ice creams are very nice too. Finally, on certain days the original fountains play - although that also generates an odour.
Versailles started off as Louis XIII's hunting lodge.
Louis XIV was inspired to create a palace at Versailles by a visit to finance minister Nicolas Fouquet's residence at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The King accused Fouquet of corruption and had him arrested, then got to work turning Versailles into a huge palace between 1661 and 1715. He used Fouquet's team of Le Vau (architect), Le Nôtre (landscape gardener) and Le Brun (painter).
Louis wanted his court and nobles to live at Versailles, so he could keep an eye on them and prevent any plotting. That's why it had to be so big.
Louis XVI was at Versailles when the French Revolution started. He was marched back to Paris and forced to live in the city, initially in the Tuileries palace, instead of out in the countryside.
Napoléon Bonaparte began the process of turning Versailles into a museum, and under Louis-Philippe in the 1830s it was designated as a Museum of the History of France.
The Treaty of Versailles that formally ended hostilities in World War I was signed in the Hall of Mirrors.
These days, other than being a giant tourist attraction, foreign heads of state are sometimes received at Versailles.
From Versailles, the route continues east on the D10 then D181 to Chaville.
After Chaville, the D181 is called la Route du Pavé des Gardes and it heads up into Meudon Forest. This is the only categorised climb of the stage. It's 1.3km at an average gradient of 6.5%. The top is at 180m above sea level after 42.8km raced.
Unless the King of the Mountains competition is unusually close after all the real climbs on the other stages, the Côte du Pavé des Gardes is unlikley to be significant.
Next on the race route is Meudon, where a branch of the Paris Observatory was founded in the ruins of the old Château de Meudon.
The race reaches the Seine and follows its course as far as the Pont de Garigliano and the France Télévisions building.
Next Stage 21 goes east along Boulevard Lefebvre, before heading NE on Avenue Jean Moulin and Avenue du Général Leclerc. The race passes the Catacombes de Paris at Denfert-Rochereau, and the Observatoire de Paris.
Soon the riders are on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which always makes me think of Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go to My Lovely? - a song that mentions the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
The peloton passes the Jardin and Palais du Luxembourg.
The race reaches the Seine again, and this time crosses it on the Pont Neuf, at the western end of the Ile de la Cité.
Now the peloton makes its way through the Cour Carré of the Museé du Louvre and past the glass Pyramide du Louvre. The riders come out on the Rue du Rivoli, notable for its transformation into a utility cycling paradise in recent years.
Here the riders join the finishing circuit: Rue du Rivoli > Place de la Concorde > Champs-Elysées (up) > Place Charles de Gaulle > Champs-Elysées (down) > Place de la Concorde > Quai des Tuileries > Rue de Rivoli.
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The intermediate sprint is on the third time across the Champs-Elysées finish line.
The sprint for the stage win is on the ninth time across the line.
The Champs-Elysées is the most famous street in Paris.
It runs for 1.2 miles from place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe at Charles de Gaulle Etoile.
The lower part of the Champs-Elysées was originally laid out by André le Nôtre as an extension of Tuileries gardens in 1667.
The street was extended from Rond-Point up to Etoile under Napoléon Bonaparte. The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Bonaparte but not completed until after his fall from power in 1815. The Champs-Elysées was remodelled under Emporer Napoléon III from 1854.
The Bastille Day parade takes place here every year.
There are eight traffic lanes on the Champs-Elysées, and it is very polluted. In 2021 Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced plans to cut space for motor vehicles by 50%, create 'tree tunnels' to improve air quality, and to give more space to pedestrians.
Apparently work will only begin after the 2024 Olympic Games, and
won't be completed until 2030.
The final stage of the Tour de France is sometimes characterised as the sprinters' world championship.
In 2022, Jasper Philipsen won on the Champs-Elysées. Will he do it again? It does seem very likely, especially as he has the best lead-out man in Mathieu van der Poel.
Could the two flip, and reward MVDP for his work during the Tour by handing him a win? Possibly, but probably not.
So many of the other sprinters have gone home - Cavendish, Ewan, Bauhaus and Jakobsen.
That leaves few challengers to Alpecin Deceuninck's dominance. Perhaps those with the best chance of defeating Philipsen & Co are Dylan Groenewegen and Mads Pedersen.
Who do you think will win Stage 21?
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Beaujolais is a wine made with Gamay grapes in the Beaujolais region. The region gets its name from the town and Lords of Beaujeu.
Gamay grapes are thin-skinned and low in tannins. They make light wines with relatively high acidity.
The Romans were the first to plant vines here, along their trading route up the Saône valley. Later, Benedictine monks did much of the wine-making.
Beaujolais Nouveau became very popular in the 1980s, with easy-drinking, fruity wines. In the late 1990s that popularity faded, and Beaujolais producers are now concentrating on more complex wines that are aged longer in oak barrels.
Fleurie is called the Queen of Beaujolais. It has floral notes, and aromas of blueberries and red fruits.
It doesn't get its name from flowers, though, but from a Roman General, Floricum.
Fleurie vineyards are on the west side of the Saône valley, facing south or south east. The soil is on pink granite, and is sandy higher up, with more clay content lower down.
La Madone is one of the best-known Fleurie wines, taking its name from a chapel on top of the hill.
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