The Paris 2024 Olympic Games road race and time trial routes were revealed on Tuesday after stage 4 of the Tour de France by the president of the games, Tony Estanguet.
It’s a 273km road race route for the men, the longest in Olympic history, and 158km for the women, on a course that favours the Classics specialists, with 2,800m and 1,700m of elevation gain respectively.
Silver Medallist from Tokyo, Wout Van Aert (Belgium), and Mathieu van der Poel (Netherlands) are two of the riders the men’s course should suit with the punchy climbs and possibility of a small group sprint at the finish.
“This is a course that should suit me,” Van der Poel said to NOS after leading Jasper Philipsen (Belgium) to victory on stage 4 of the Tour de France. “This could be a Classic in Flanders.”
He was quick to say, however, that he still had “the mountain bike [race] planned in the back of my mind” after he crashed out of the Tokyo Olympic mountain bike cross-country race on the opening lap. He could compete in a combination of events, if he qualifies, as the road race falls five days after the mountain biking.
Scheduling has caused the final stage of the 2024 Tour de France to move from Paris to Nice for a time trial instead of the usual procession into Paris, as the Olympic Games get underway on Friday, July 26.
The individual time trials at the Olympics take place on July 27, while the road races will be held a fortnight after the Tour finishes, on August 3 for the men and August 4 for the women.
The men's road race will tackle 13 punchy climbs and the women's race will take in nine on a course that heads east out of Paris before looping back in towards the Trocadéro and finishing adjacent to the Eiffel Tower on the Pont d’léna bridge.
Racing will be decided up the cobbled Montmartre hill (1km at 6.5), which features three times on both parcours and should act as an explosive finishing test to either launch a solo attack or hang on for a final sprint.
It should serve up a mix of sightseeing and suffering as the riders pass the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre, the Invalides and the Sacré Cœur Basilica on their journeys out of and back into the French capital.
For the first time, there will also be an equal number of men and women participating in the road race with 90 each. They will ride the same final 18.4km circuit in the northeast of Paris twice before completing 9.5km of flat racing to the finish line.
“Road cycling races in cities are exceptional, and they are free access events for the fans,” said Estanguet. “We’ll have a combination of a great show and a great sporting event. It’s also the longest race in the history of the Olympic Games. It will be a difficult race with a very exciting final.”
The reigning champions in the road race are Richard Caparaz (Ecuador) and Anna Kiesenhofer (Austria), who won as a huge outsider against a stacked Dutch squad after getting into the early break and holding off Annemiek van Vleuten (Netherlands).
Time trials
The time trials will be the first medal events of any cycling discipline at Paris 2024, both coming the day after the opening ceremony on July 27.
More history will be made as the men and women will tackle the same 32.4km flat course that features a balance between long straights, where you can put the power down, and technical corners where skills on the TT bike will pay dividends.
The 35 men and 35 women will start on the Esplanade des Invalides before heading east, past some of Paris’s historical sporting locations including the Vélodrome Jacques Anquetil, which was used as the finish line for the Tour de France between 1968-1974.
After the opening ceremony takes place on the river Seine the previous day, the riders will clock their finishing times on one of the bridges featured, the Pont Alexandre III.
Primož Roglič (Slovenia) and Van Vleuten are the reigning Olympic time trial champions, but the Tokyo course was much hillier and this should be more of a chance for the pure time trial specialists, such as Van Aert and Filippo Ganna (Italy) on the men’s side and Ellen van Dijk (Netherlands) and Marlen Reusser (Switzerland) on the women’s.
