Rambouillet Paris Champs- Élysées

The final stage of the 2019 Tour sees the ceremonial ride to the Champs- Élysées, followed by a headlong sprint

Modern Paris owes its geography and architecture almost entirely to Napoléon III’s Seine prefect Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In the second half of the 19th century the centre of the French capital was a crowded, unhealthy place, where disease was rife and carriages could barely move through the narrow thoroughfares. Haussmann’s solution: broad avenues to connect the arrondissements more coherently, allow goods and people to move more freely, eradicate the slums and, it was noted, facilitate policing and reduce the capacity of the locals to riot. The Champs-Élysées was transformed from a densely populated neighbourhood into the broad, almost agoraphobic avenue that it is today.

The aim was to turn Paris into a major world city; one of the side effects was to create the potential for a finish worthy of the greatest bike race in the world. The frenetic laps of central Paris – around the Arc de Triomphe, up and down the Champs and along the River Seine and Tuileries Gardens past the Louvre museum – may not be significant in terms of anything except producing a stage winner and anointing the final

yellow jersey of the Tour, but it shows the best face of Paris to the world.

The Paris sprint is a simple, if thuggish one. The granite setts of the Champs-Élysées and the length and width of the final straight favour the resilient and powerful, and while positioning and momentum are still important, moving up is more straightforward than in other sprints. It’s ever so slightly uphill too in the final few hundred metres to the finish line. However, the speed is extremely high, so starting near the front is still crucial. Despite it being the final stage, the last three winners here have all been riders getting their first victories of that Tour.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.” The same could be said of the Tour de France sprinters.