Blog - Tour de France 2007

Tour de France: new website www.letour.fr

Only 3 more weeks before the start of the Tour de France 2007 in London! For ASO (the company which organises the Tour de France) this is the perfect moment to launch a new version of the Tour website, www.letour.fr .

CBNews already announced on March 19th that ASO had chosen Nurun (I still didn't find any confirmation about this anywhere else, not even on Nurun's own website) to completely redevelop the website www.letour.fr and to use the most recent technologies availab ...

Tour de France news: T-mobile and ARD/ZDF, Quick.Step and selling jerseys and Euro Relais

When I say that news about this year's Tour arrives each day right now, I really mean it ... To prove that it's true, here are three other news items related to the Tour which have been published in the past yesterday or Friday.

First of all T-Mobile and it sponsoring of the Tour de France broadcasting on German TV, how Patrick Lefévère tries to organise the sales of team jerseys in the Tour de France and finally Euro Relais which found an original way to match Tour fans and houses for rent.


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Tour de France news: Sagem official partner and the Tour in HD on TV

With less than a month to go before the Tour de France start in London, news about this year's Tour arrives each day ... I picked two interesting things which officially became public this week.

Sagem official partner of the Tour de France 2007

Tour de France 2007: (preliminary) selections of riders

UPDATE 9 June 2007: Agritubel and T-Mobile added
UPDATE 9 June 2007: Caisse d'Epargne and Rabobank added
UPDATE 12 June 2007: AG2R, Astana and Barloworld added
UPDATE 19 June 2007: part of the list is now final for Agritubel, Gerolsteiner added
UPDATE 23 June 2007: updates for AG2R, Euskatel-Euskadi and T-Mobile and Lampre-Fondital and Liquigas have been added
UPDATE 24 June 2007: update for Agritubel
UPDATE 25 juni 2007: update for Rabobank and Quick.Step-Innergetic added

On May 30th the team selection for the Tour de France 2007 has been announced by ASO.

As of today, fourteen teams already announced their (preliminary) selections of riders: AG2R, Agritubel, Astana, Barloworld, Caisse d'Epargne, Euskaltel - Euskadi, Gerolsteiner, Lampre-Fondi ...

Tour de France 2007: team selection published - with a 'surprise'

The selection of teams which will participate in the Tour de France 2007 has been announced today by ASO.

The organiser of the Tour de France today announced on its website that, in addition to the 18 Pro Tour teams (out of 20) which had already been selected on December 12th, 2006, 3 wild cards have been given out. These wild cards have allowed to select the French Agritubel, the English Barloworld and the Swiss Astana.

The wildcards for Agritubel and Astana aren't really surprising: Agritubel is a French team which already participated in last year's Tour and Astana's selection is in line with expectations as well with riders such as Alexandre Vinokourov and Andreas Klöden.
Barloworld's (an English team with a South-African sponsor ...

Stade 2: Christian Prudhomme on last week's confessions

Tonight Christian Prudhomme, the Tour de France director, was one of the guests in Stade 2 , the sports show on France 2 and he answered to questions from Gérard Holtz and Jean René Godard concerning the confessions of several ex-riders of the Telekom team (which has since become T-Mobile).

Seated next to Amélie Mauresmo (because Stade 2 was live from Roland Garros, which start was by the way not really as planned due to heavy rain) he gave his much awaited reaction on the confessions of especially Erik Zabel and Bjarne Riis.

First -obvious- question: Riis is currently the Team CSC manager while he now confirm ...

Tour de France: stage details now published!!

UPDATE 2 May 2007: Links to stage details added for stages 9 to 15.
UPDATE 14 May 2007: Links to stage details added for stages 16 to 19. Only the final stage is still missing.
UPDATE 16 May 2007: Link to stage details added for the final stage to the Champs-Elysées in Paris.

After the announcement of the different stages of this year's Tour de France on Thursday October 26, 2006 we of course already knew where the Tour de France 2007 would go and for the stages in the mountains also which track they would follow.

But to know the full details, every one was of course waiting to get full track details with the time schedules for the different points on the track of each stage. For those of you who would like to know whether the Tour de France might perhaps be somewhere around the corner of where you'll be on holidays in France (or for those who p ...

The official partners of the Tour de France 2007 and how they communicate on the Internet

UPDATE 9 April 2007: added 'La P'tite Boucle Nesquik' for Nesquik.

After having published an article on this blog about how the different Tour cities communicate on the Internet around the event which will take place in their city in July, now it's time for the official partners of the Tour. Again, we'll see that some of these partners reserved a lot of space on their website around the sponsoring of the Tour de France 2007, while others don't even talk about it at all. In general, the information which is available seems to be quite static information, in some cases even written for a Tour de France a few years ago without having been updated since.
A tour on the websites of the different brands ... ...

The Tour stages and the Tour cities in 2007

On July 7, 2007 the Tour de France 2007 starts with the prologue in London. With a sidetrip through Belgium and one of the stages partly going through Spain (without stopping in the country though), the Tour de France then stops by in several cities in France.
These cities pay a relatively big amount of money to the Tour de France organisation to have the Tour start or finish in their city. This is interesting for those cities since the Tour de France is the third world wide most broadcasted sports event, after the Olympic Games and the World Championship Football, knowing that the Tour is organised each year while the other two are organised only once each 4 years. The Tour de France is being broadcasted, either live or as a recap, in 185 countries around the globe. In addition to that the Tour de France of course also leads to more tourisme in these cities with people spending money during their stay.

UPDATE 9 April 2007: information on the Jeunes Reporters du Tour programme organised by Vélo 101 and ASO added
UPDATE 18 April 2007: extra information about A chacun son Tour + addition press accreditation at the end of the article
UPDATE 15 May 2007: link to an article on the selection of the Jeunes Reporters du Tour

People who read this website regularly probably already know it: from July 7th till July 29th the yearly cycling tour, the Tour de France, will be organised again.

Starting in London and in addition to the many stages in France, this year also with some sidestops in Belgium and Spain (you can also read my blog post about the Tour de France 2007 on this) this of course is an event in itself, but this blog post is about the other events which are organised around the Tour de France!

In their order of appearance of 2007's calendar the ...