On more than one occasion the Tour de France has been compared to a travelling circus, a sort of modern-day Barnum & Bailey. Nobody understands this better than Yannick Goasduff, who day in and day out oversees the setting up and breaking down of the ever-sprawling Tour de France stage start.
“I have been the director the Tour de France stage starts for 21 years,” Goasduff says. “That’s half of my life.”
Goasduff can be easily overlooked at the in the morning before the starts, as he is discreet and maintains a low profile under his grey baseball cap and signature aviator sunglass. But for those within the Tour, his presence is nothing short of ubiquitous, as he moves from one sector to another throughout the morning.
“We generally need about five hectares (ed. roughly 12.5 acres) to set up the starting area in each town. We have to have space for the team paddocks, the sing-in podium, the VIP village, and they all have to be surrounded by barriers,” Goasduff explains. “Those zones take up about half of the space and the rest is for the different parking areas, be it for the press, the sponsors or the publicity caravan, because there are about 1,200 vehicles that travel with the Tour every day.”
Goasduff stands outside the start village on stage three during the Tour's historic Grand Depart in Italy.
Days start early for Goasduff and his team. as they are on site by six every morning. And once the riders roll out, the breakdown begins before moving to the start town the following day. We start setting up around six every evening and work well into the night.”
But it many ways, it is only when the Tour is finished that Goasduff works on his main job, that of examining potential stage starts for upcoming Tours. “It is my responsibility to respond to the expectations of Christian Prudhomme so that a town can one day host a stage start,” he says. “I visit the towns even before the towns know that we are seriously considering them and then I come back to Christian with an analysis of what is possible. I explain the challenges, and what would need to happen so that a town can host a Tour.”
The Tour always attempts to mix small towns with larger ones, and both provide their own unique challenges for Goasduff. “In the small town we need to, figuratively speaking, push the walls out, and then in the bigger towns, the challenge is how to best present the Tour within the city.”
A typical example of the compromises often made was at the Grand Départ in Florence this year. “In Florence it was not possible to close down the whole city for the start of the Tour,” he explained. “As a result, we chose to start by the hippodrome because it was relatively close to the centre of town and yet had the space to install the needed infrastructure.”
While the Tour de France headquarters are found on the outskirts of Paris, Goasduff is rarely present as travels year-round visiting town after town. Already, even before this year’s Tour began, Goasduff had confirmed most of the towns that will be found on the 2025 route and has nearly finished his planning on the recently-announced 2026 Grand Départ in Barcelona.
“The biggest challenge for me is to respond to the wishes of the towns and cities so that they are happy to host the Tour, but at the same time to assure that there is enough space and security,” Goasduff says. “Once in a while I have to tell Christian that is simply not possible. It doesn’t happen often, but on occasion I have to tell him, ‘I am sorry, but I do not see how I can realistically pull off a stage start in this town.’ Sometimes if the risks are too great you have to accept that it is simply not possible.”
But while the challenges are many, so are the satisfactions, and looking back over his decades organising Tour de France starts, one stands out in particular, that of the 2007 Grand Départ in London. “It was a very complicated start because of the terrorist bombings in London just two years earlier. The context was really complicated,” Goasduff recalls.
“Yet it was also one of the most satisfying. I mean to have the start on The Mall, between Horse Guards Parade and Trafalgar Square, right in the heart of London. So while London was one of the most complex starts, it was also one of the most satisfying. And today, when I go back to London as a tourist, and go back there today I cannot believe I was able to work in such an exceptional place.”
