Road Cycling Preview: A Classic in the Making?

For the men’s and women’s road races, think Belgian Classics with a twist of Parisian glamor and sophistication.

The world’s best athletes compete this summer at the pinnacle of sporting excellence. Alongside a full program of events at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome, this summer also features men’s and women’s road race and time trial events.

The Routes 

The men’s road race route is 273km / 170 mi long with 2,973m / 9,754 ft of climbing. (Our plotted routes – kudos to the Montmartre Vélo Club for mapping the routes on Strava – include the neutralized roll-out before the gun goes.)

The women’s road race route, meanwhile, is 158km / 99 mi and features 1,706m / 5,597 ft of uphill.

What does that mean? Well, the women’s race, which takes place on 4 August, is longer than most other events on the women’s calendar, whether one-day Classics or stages in stage races – longer than Liège–Bastogne–Liège Femmes and longer than most stages of this year’s Giro d’Italia Women and the Tour de France Femmes. It’s about the same length as the 2024 Tour of Flanders for Women. That’s possibly the race that it resembles the most. 

The men’s race, which is on 3 August, is also comfortably in Belgian Classics territory – it’s longer and bumpier than Flanders, though not quite as difficult as Liège.

Starting in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the riders will tour Paris’s Left Bank before heading south-west, passing close to the stunningly opulent Palais de Versailles. The men then visit the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye before rejoining the women’s route in the picturesque Chevreuse Valley. This is a classic destination for Parisian weekend cyclists, offering as it does twisting roads and a surprisingly rustic setting for somewhere so close to the nation’s capital.

Typical climbs in the Chevreuse include the Côte de Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse (1.42km / 0.9 mi @ 5.8%) and the Côte du Chateaufort (0.88km / 0.55 mi @ 5.8%). There are no big mountains near Paris, but the routes are relentlessly hilly – up, down, up, down – and both races will be long, arduous days out.

Both races finish with a sting in the tail: two circuits around the district of Montmartre, and two climbs up the steep, cobbled Côte de la Butte de Montmartre (also known as rue Lepic, if you want to go ride it ahead of time). The final climb is only 9km / 5.6 mi from what will be a spectacular finish under the Eiffel Tower.

So Who’s Going to Win?

These races are different from almost all of the rest of the calendar. In national colors, riders won’t have the support of their usual teammates (though they might be able to count on a little tacit support from their friends on the road), and, since teams are smaller and the peloton is smaller, the races will be hard to control.

In Tokyo in 2021, Austria’s Anna Kiesenhofer stole the race away from bigger names, but this year the favorite has got to be Belgium’s Lotte Kopecky, who thrives on this kind of course. Demi Vollering will have her work cut out for her to help compatriot and team-mate, the sprinter Lorena Wiebes, win out.

Top contenders in the men's race include the Dutchman Matthieu van der Poel and Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel.

We have our eyes on Denmark’s Mads Pedersen, Belgium’s Wout van Aert, or at the outside USA’s Matteo Jorgenson and France’s veteran puncheur Julian Alaphilippe.