For the first time since 1905, the Tour de France will not finish in Paris. In 2024, racers of Le Tour will finish with a time trial in the French seaside town of Nice. Why? The Olympic Games in Paris. Despite the race being shifted a week earlier to allow riders to compete in both Le Tour and the Olympic Games, the end of the race is still only five days before the Olympic opening ceremonies, and Paris simply couldn’t host both major events so close together.

Athletes from around the world will already be gathering in Paris by the time the Tour de France is in the final stages, making Paris a gridlocked nightmare for organising any event outside of the Olympics.

Yesterday, the Mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi, Tour de France general director Christian Prudhomme, Director General of Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) Yann Le Moenner, and Prefet of Alpes Maritimes Bernard Gonzalez made the announcement that Nice will host the final stage of the 2024 Tour de France. Nice has been part of the Tour in the past, and of course, it’s hosted the Paris-Nice finish line, but this will be the first time Nice has hosted a cycling finale of this magnitude. (The 2024 Tour de France will also dip into Italy.)

Equally exciting is the time trial format, which can create a tension-filled final stage if there are several riders with only seconds dividing them. As ASO explains, “The sporting qualities of the riders likely to win mean that the Tour could remain undecided until the last few kilometres, as was the case in 1989, the last time the event offered a time trial to close the proceedings. On that day, Greg LeMond beat Laurent Fignon by 58 seconds to win his second Tour by the narrowest margin in history, eight seconds… It is said that records are made to be broken, and the context of a battle of mere seconds takes on a new dimension when looking at the final weekend in general.”

No comment has been made regarding the 2024 Tour de France Femmes, however. We’re hoping to get more information soon, since if the timeline that ASO has used in 2022 and 2023 continues, with the first stage of the women’s race starting at the end of the men’s Tour, the Tour de France Femmes will overlap with the Olympic Games. We hope to have more information about the 2024 Tour de France Femmes soon.