Mulhouse La Planche des Belles Filles
Crucial GC action and almost non- stop climbing in the Vosges for the first serious mountains day of the 2019 Tour
Legend has it that when a force of Swedish soldiers arrived at Plancher-Bas, in the southern foothills of the Massif des Vosges in 1635, the women of the town, the ‘belles filles’, fled into the mountains to escape the invaders. When they were discovered, and faced with the prospect of having to submit to the soldiers, they instead all leapt into the cold, deep waters of a mountain lake. The mountain on which they hid is now known by the name La Planche des Belles Filles.
Of course, the story is an allegory. Swedish mercenaries were indeed marauding around the Holy Roman Empire in the 1630s, in a defining episode of the Thirty Years War. Storytellers must have taken the Swedish invasion, improvised on the original name of the forest on the mountain – the place of ‘belles fahys’ or ‘beautiful beech trees’ and come up with the myth.
So La Planche des Belles Filles is the perfect place for a Tour de France stage. The Tour also thrives on its myths and legends, and in only three visits, all since 2012, this short climb has become one of the race’s emblematic locations. The story goes that whoever wears the yellow jersey atop La Planche des Belles Filles will go on to win the Tour – Bradley
Wiggins, Vincenzo Nibali and Chris Froome have all done so.
But just as the myth of the Belles Filles turns out to have a more prosaic explanation, there are strong rational reasons for why the climb has turned out to be a kingmaker. It has always come somewhere around the end of the first week of the race, as its first significant summit finish - stage
7 in 2012, stage 10 in 2014 and stage 5 in 2017. Even less romantically, it’s a 15-minute effort to the top – the best rider in the best shape will logically come out on top, no matter what the consequences for narrative appeal. But with three cat-1 climbs preceding the summit finish this year, in what is one of the hardest stages of the entire Tour, another significant chapter in the story of La Planche des Belles Filles will be written this year.