The best way to approach the Pyrenees in a way that allows one to get them, is – sorry – to drive. About an hour’s journey southwest from Toulouse airport on the A64, the Autoroute la Pyrénéenne, the windscreen frames a panoramic vista of jagged peaks, left to right, top to bottom. The foreshortening makes the range look even more abrupt than it is – you get the sense that they rise directly out of a flat plain.
There aren’t many mountain ranges like this – the Pyrenees rise more steeply than the Alps, whose peaks may be higher, but are also obscured on the approach by the gradual ripples of their foothills. The Pyrenees happen altogether more suddenly, a change of terrain that the riders of the 2025 Tour de France are going to experience in a very literal way. The 19th-century English politician and journalist Harold Spender said of France’s southern mountain range, “There is something almost unearthly about the high mountain landscapes of the Pyrenees. You have no gentle foreground to diminish the savagery of the mountains.”
This is almost, but not quite true in the context of the 2025 Tour. The largely flat opening week and a total of one middle mountain stage in the first 11 days is as gentle a foreground that the Tour has seen since… 2006? 2002? 1994? Even the spectacularly unmountainous 1992 Tour at least had a middle mountain stage on the opening weekend. However, the savagery of the 2025 race’s first incursion into the mountains, a trio of Pyrenean stages, is undiminished by the relatively straightforward nature of what has gone before. Stage 12 climbs the Col du Soulor and finishes on Hautacam. The next day, there is a time trial finishing at altitude in Peyragudes. And stage 14 looks like the hardest day of the entire Tour: a summit finish at Superbagnères following climbs of the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. It may be that these three days, these three summit finishes, will tell us everything we need to know about the 2025 Tour de France.
The Pyrenees are borderlands, and borderlands are complex, ambiguous, liminal spaces. The border between Spain and France once sat north of the mountains; even after the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees largely fixed the line roughly along the watershed through the range, the blurring and overlapping of cultures that you get from the movement of people across borders made the Pyrenees a unique frontier – fixed, monumental and huge in their physical presence, but nevertheless porous and changeable. And no human ever saw a mountain range without wondering what was on the other side of it. Over the centuries, the mountains have been a conduit for invading armies, for the religious – most iterations of the Camino de Santiago must necessarily traverse the Pyrenees – and for traders legal and otherwise.
And yet the Pyrenees have also always been a destination in themselves, a magnet at various times for Catholics, dreamers, smugglers, romantics, creatives, skiers and, in the modern era, outdoor sports enthusiasts, seeking to lose themselves and find themselves in the thin mountain air. “The Pyrenees are for artists and poets,” said the 19th-century explorer Henry Russell.
And, he might have added, climbers and nostalgists. When the 2025 Tour de France route was presented last November, a lot of attention was taken by the long traverse of the north, and by the hard summit finishes of the final week: Mont Ventoux and the Col de la Loze. Mine fixated immediately on the bottom left-hand corner of the route map, my eyes drawn first to the name ‘Superbagnères’, which gave me butterflies because it’s one of the holy places of my teenage cycling fandom, and then to the Pyrenean stages in general, once I realised what the organisers had planned: three consecutive summit finishes, and a concentrated hit of intense and tough routes. The author Matthew Carr wrote a book about the psychogeography of the Pyrenees, and what he described as their ‘genius loci’ – the spirit of the place – and he called it The Savage Frontier, symbolising the perceived danger and wild terrain of the high mountains, and their effectiveness at dividing France from Spain. The Pyrenean stages of the 2025 Tour are themselves a savage frontier, also fraught with danger, between the phoney wars and tension of the opening 11 days, and the crucial second half of the race. But they are also three varied stages with very different meanings and resonances. I mean, the 2025 peloton will measure the climbs in gradients, 40-minute power numbers and calories per hour, as they do these days, but the Tour is about more than just the 2025 peloton.
Hautacam
Hautacam is not a place in the sense that most Tour stage locations are places, where people have their homes and workplaces. It’s a protected environment, and so nobody lives there – even the few people who work in the ski station commute from the valley (this will change on the day of the Tour, the manager of the Hautacam Leisure Park tells me – with the morning road closure on the climb, the staff are planning to stay over the night before). Hautacam itself consists of an elongated and sloping car park which is thankfully extensive enough to accommodate the infrastructure of the Tour de France, a couple of buildings from which skis in winter and e-bikes and scooters in summer can be hired, and an auberge serving calorific food. Further development is prohibited, so future Tour stages will continue to finish in this otherwise featureless location, unless they decide to take the left turn out of the car park to climb a further kilometre to the Col de Tramassel, where the road peters out into a gravel footpath.
On the morning that I visit, it’s a beautiful spring day, though a thin wind is enough to make me shiver, and I can feel the sun burning my arms at the same time as gooseflesh pricks my skin. When the Tour comes, Hautacam is like any summit finish at the Tour – there will be thousands of people here. But we are between seasons – the snow has melted and the skiers have gone home, while hiking season has barely begun. Nevertheless a few cyclists have already made it to the top. Jean-Jacques is from Lannemezan, so the Col d’Aspin is more his stamping ground, and he’s tackled a lot of the famous climbs in the Alps, but he was inspired by the sunshine in the morning to pack his bike into his car and drive to Lourdes, then cycle to Hautacam and up the climb for the first time.
“It’s very different to the Aspin. That’s nice and regular, whereas this climb breaks your legs. It goes up, it goes down, there’s a flat bit, then the ramps are really steep,” he says. “But it’s a magnificent climb. It reminds me of the Alps, with the very open view from the top.”
Jean-Jacques used to race in sportives, but he’s just enjoying bagging climbs these days. He’s paying his own homage to the 2025 Tour by planning a trip to the Ventoux in September.
Marie-Christine and her partner have ridden the climb before, and are knocking off local climbs while they stay in the area. Yesterday they rode the Spandelles and Luz Ardiden. Today: Hautacam. Tomorrow the Soulor, but they’re skipping the Aubisque because it’s still closed. She says it’s hard work, but you’re never bored in the mountains. “I don’t like to just ride along at 35 kilometres per hour on the flat,” she says. Marie-Christine also observes that it feels like we are a long way from civilisation up here in the Hautacam car park: “It’s quite wild here,” she says, gesturing at the surrounding peaks and the view down into the valley.
Marie-Christine is right, though. Hautacam is wild, and wild things have happened on this climb in the Tour.
Perhaps it’s the gradient. The ascent pitches between very steep sections and actual downhills, so Hautacam resists any attempt at control, uniformity or predictability. However, it’s more likely that since most of the climb’s appearances in the Tour were through the 1990s and 2000s, the pharmaceutical excesses of those years were simply magnified by the occasion. Take your pick from Miguel Indurain and Luc Leblanc sprinting up the final three kilometres, in the drops, in thick, thick fog in 1994, the climb’s debut in the Tour. Or Lance Armstrong taking the yellow jersey here on a rainy day in 2000. Or Leonardo Piepoli winning in 2008 but then being stripped of his victory after testing positive, with the default stage win going to his team-mate Juan José Cobo, whose own victory in the 2011 Vuelta a España was stripped from him for doping. 2008 was particularly wild – three of the top six at Hautacam (Piepoli, Bernhard Kohl and Riccardo Riccò) were eventually disqualified, and that didn’t even include Cobo. Things have been a little less controversial since then – Vincenzo Nibali in 2014 and Jonas Vingegaard in 2022 have been the subsequent winners, both en route to overall victory, but even without the controversy, these were both Tour-defining rides. Something always happens at Hautacam – it’s a magnetic pole for any edition of the Tour in which it appears, spinning the needle on the race’s moral compass.
But more than any other, the performance of Bjarne Riis on Hautacam in the 1996 Tour defines not only the place and its tendency to set the weather of the race, but an entire era, in all its complexity and imperfection. Riis humiliated his rivals, winning the stage wearing the yellow jersey, extending his overall lead to over three minutes and taking just over 34 and a half minutes to ride the climb. But as well as defining a Tour, Riis’s ride on Hautacam was a clear demonstration of the transformative effects of EPO. It’s ironic that Hautacam is administered by the city of Lourdes, just a few kilometres along the Gave de Pau river from the base of the climb. Lourdes was the location of an alleged miracle, the apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1858, and Catholics in their millions visit the city in search of transcendence, grace, healing and, who knows, forgiveness. But all I’ve ever found in Lourdes is holy water marked up to an irreligiously outrageous price, bad hotels that smell faintly of disinfectant, expensive kitsch, flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark and cynicism dressed up as hope. The perfect place for Bjarne Riis’s miraculous ride.
Peyragudes
Peyragudes was inevitable, given the way the world has gone in the last 10 years. For over a century, the Col de Peyresourde was absolutely fine, appearing on the Tour de France route 67 times between its first inclusion in 1910 and 2017, a convenient east-west climb out of, or into, Bagnères-de-Luchon. However, while the Tour thrives on tradition and loves nothing more than to repeat itself, for better and for worse, the modern route designers, led by Thierry Gouvenou at Amaury Sports Organisation, have had to develop an eye for the innovative and especially for the spectacular, the better to compete in the attention economy. Objectively, the Peyresourde is pretty spectacular, and I’ll never get bored of the view from the stack of hairpins at the top on the Luchon side, but in the world of TikTok, Instagram reels and Netflix, the Peyresourde isn’t enough any more.
In 2012, there was a stage finish in Peyragudes, the ski village just south of the Col de Peyresourde. That was a nice innovation – a twist on the usual traverse and descent of the Peyresourde. However, the dominant feature of Peyragudes is the steeply sloping runway of the altiport (mountain altiports have steep runways because there isn’t generally space for a long runway, so planes can use the downhill to accelerate and take off, and the uphill to land and decelerate). And Gouvenou must have seen the access track connecting the road to the base of the runway, and been unable to resist the temptation. Any cyclist knows that the most demoralising terrain of all, bar none, is a road that is both incredibly steep – in this case 16 per cent – and also quite wide. The slow-motion sprints that happened on the Peyragudes altiport in 2017 and 2022 were horribly compelling, and Netflix in particular made hay with the 2022 edition. The stage this year is a time trial, which won’t make the final pitch any less intimidating for the riders.
In Mountains of the Mind, the author Robert Macfarlane wrote about why humans climb, explaining that there is no simpler allegory of success than the ascent of a mountain: “The mountain summit has become a secular symbol of effort and reward.” If Hautacam, the day before, is inextricably linked with Lourdes and apparent miracles, then Peyragudes is an altogether more earthly effort. There’s no place for praying or mystic intervention on that final ramp, just the brute laws of physics. Though there will be gains and losses on this day in the Tour, just reaching the top will be reward enough for most riders.
It still feels aloof from the world up here. It’s a spring day between seasons, with a sharp breeze, and Peyragudes is not the cycling destination that Hautacam and Superbagnères are. I see plenty of cyclists on the Peyresourde, including double Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard, but few make the detour to the ski village, and the altiport is understandably closed to leisure cyclists. (That said, there is a Strava segment with a lot of names on it, and the fence is not exactly high.) In fact the only cyclist on the day I visit is a downhill mountain biker who has transported his bike up the climb on the back of his car, aiming to ride the Mountain Biking World Cup downhill course which starts just below the altiport. The start ramp, a functional wooden construction, is a permanent fixture on the hillside, and in a half-hearted attempt to prevent access, somebody has hung a chain across the entrance, but the wind is making it whip and slap against the wooden walls, a percussive and naggingly irregular reminder of how exposed the mountains are to the elements, even at comparatively low altitudes.
There’s something melancholy about ski villages during the off-season – too quiet, and it’s a different kind of silence to elsewhere in the mountains. The slapping chain beating out the seconds and minutes of this spring day only exacerbates this. Peyragudes on Tour day may be a festival of noise and colour, with algorithms pushing bite-sized snippets of straining cyclists and clips of drone footage towards our eyeballs. But as with much that is designed to look good on social media, it’s wise to be cognisant of the unfiltered view.
Superbagnères
Superbagnères is a holy place for cycling fans of a certain age, especially anglophones. Especially those who followed the Tours of the second half of the 1980s. Especially those who are prone to nostalgia. (I am at the centre of this four-ellipse Venn diagram.) Though the climb appeared four times in the race through the 1960s and 1970s, twice as a time trial, it was consecrated by its inclusion in the first two of Greg LeMond’s three Tour victories, in 1986 and 1989.
Cycling, and life, was never so vivid and colourful as it was in those years. It was an era of shining chrome, primary colours, and the first mirrored shades and fluorescent cycling clothing. The photography, unfiltered, shone with the intensity of light streaming in through stained glass windows. The riders of the Tour were flawed, instinctive and fallible. And compelling. Long story short, the 1986 Tour was a battle between LeMond and Bernard Hinault: team-mates. LeMond had desisted from taking time off an injured and faltering Hinault the year before and been promised the 1986 Tour as reward. Hinault did the dirty on LeMond by attacking him on the first Pyrenean stage in 1986 and taking 4:37. He tried to do the same the next day, but overestimated his abilities and blew up, getting caught at the bottom of Superbagnères and conceding almost exactly the same amount of time that he’d gained the day before. Three years later, Superbagnères was one of the locations of the back-and-forth battle between LeMond and Laurent Fignon in the greatest and closest men’s Tour there has ever been.
After 1989, Superbagnères fell into obsolescence. A narrow and weak bridge not far out of Luchon was unable to support the weight of the lorries carrying the infrastructure of the modern Tour, and it was only when the bridge was bypassed by a new section of road that the Tour was able to make its return. The old bridge is still there, fenced off and overgrown with foliage already.
I am simultaneously happy about and wary of the Tour returning to Superbagnères. This could be considered the final part of a three-chapter tying up of loose ends from the 1980s by the modern Tour, following the second visit since 1986 of the Col du Granon in 2022 and the much-lauded return to the Puy de Dome the following year. The Granon, where Jonas Vingegaard and Jumbo-Visma took Tadej Pogačar apart, was a hit. The return to the Puy de Dome, spectatorless to protect the regional national park of which it is the centrepiece and therefore devoid of atmosphere, was a miss. Will I regret revisiting this scene from my youth?
But what a scene. The summit of Superbagnères is dominated by the huge but sadly disused Grand Hotel, a massive L-shaped Edwardian edifice that treads a line between elegant and monumental and looks like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. The Grand is visible for the entirety of the final two steep kilometres of the climb, though as riders make their painfully slow progress to the top, it never seems to get any closer, much like the weather station on Mont Ventoux.
The climb itself is a hard one to love, aesthetically, though it’s very atmospheric, in a claustrophobic sort of way. One of the characteristic features of the French side of the Pyrenees, less true on the Spanish side, is their greenness – while the southern side of the chain is dominated by dry Mediterranean winds and the easterly Levanter, the French side gets the full force of Atlantic weather coming in from the Bay of Biscay. In Spain, the Pyrenees are rockier and populated by fir trees and mountain pines. The French side is all waterfalls, rushing rivers like the Gave de Pau and verdant deciduous forest. And the early kilometres of Superbagnères, once a rider has left the shabby grandeur of Bagnères-de-Luchon, are overhung by trees, the air thick with humidity and loud with water. There’s an interminable climb, just a few slight bends and a gradient which like Hautacam varies between steep and negative, until a curious stack of hairpins, virtually flat between the turns, about halfway up. More forest, and the scenery only really starts to open up in the final six kilometres. But while it’s not the most beautiful climb for much of the distance, it is extremely hard, and maybe only the Ventoux and Tourmalet can match it on the 2025 parcours. The view from the top is spectacular. Bagnères-de-Luchon and the steep-sided valley in which it sits is to the north, the Spanish border and Col du Portillon are a few miles to the east, and the huge 3,000-metre Maladeta massif in Spain overlooks Superbagnères from the south.
After three hard, hard days in the Pyrenees, some riders may be enjoying the view of the Tour from the summit of Superbagnères a lot more than others. The Pyrenees may be for artists and poets, and some cyclists of the Tour, but in 2025 they will belong to all cycling fans.
This feature first appeared in Rouleur 136
