CHAMPAGNE MOMENT
The Avenue des Champs- Élysées has hosted the curtain closer of the Tour de France for the last 45 years. Adam Becket recalls the history of cycling’s most famous arena
The Avenue des Champs-Élysées takes its name from the Ancient Greek idea of paradise, the Elysian Fields. Once a year since 1975, the peloton has thundered up the most famous French road to finish the Tour de France, with little care for the history that they are rolling over. The Champs-Élysées was not laid out in the 17th century, and improved by Baron Haussmann in the 19th, to become the centrepiece of a sport. Yet that is what it had become.
The Champs has been used as the setting for the finish of the Tour for 45 years, after Tour director Félix Lévitan gained permission from then President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to use the most French street for one of the most French activities, the Tour de France.
No wonder permission had to be asked, with the Champs being a central part of the French national psyche. It is on the Axe historique, the line of monuments and buildings that runs from the site of the Palace of the Tuileries, now the Louvre, past the Arc de Triomphe to La Defense. The avenue has been the focal point of revolutions and protests, from the original French Revolution, to the Gilet Jaunes movement, via the Paris Commune, and the student uprisings and counter protests of 1968. It has also seen some of the darkest days of French history, with victory parades of German troops taking place along it in 1871 and 1940, before some of the most joyous, like the liberation of Paris in 1944 during World War II.
Despite its reputation as one of the most glamorous streets in the world, with its famous fashion houses, and even a fancy McDonald’s with white arches, the Champs is far from glamorous to cycle along.
“Every year, the cobbles get worse, there are more potholes,” Michael Schär of CCC explained. “Once I even broke my stem on the Champs. There are a lot of flat tyres. The cobbles aren’t comparable to Roubaix, but they are like the ones in Flanders.”
Since then, all but six final stages have finished in a bunch sprint, the last breakaway winner being Alexander Vinokourov in 2005. More often than not, it is treated as an unofficial world championships for sprinters, Mark Cavendish being the most prolific with four consecutive wins between 2009 and 2012.
Ben King, who rides for NTT, said that his first Champs stage was like an “out of body experience”.
Schär, who has ridden nine Tours, said: “For me, the most emotional thing is when you come out of the tunnel, you have this long straight, and all the people are cheering so loud - you come from silence into volume. It’s a moment where I get goosebumps, and you feel like you’ve accomplished something. I’ve never seen my family in the crowd, despite always looking.”
The famed slogan used during the 1968 protests might have read “la beauté est dans la rue” - “beauty is in the street” - but for cycling fans, the beauty is on the cobbles, as the peloton enters its own version of paradise at the end of a gruelling three weeks. In the heart of Paris, the most famous French street has become synonymous with the Tour.