Presentations - sans Powerpoint

Tour de France 2025

Thursday 3 July: Teams’ Presentation,  Lille
By car: 0 km
By bike: 0 km

Walking: 17km

The day started well with a bonus. I realised that there’s two main railway stations in Lille, and I had been planning to use the wrong one. It would be perfectly possible to use public transport to get to Lille for today’s presentation of the teams; I didn’t have to drive to a metro station on the edge of the city and get the metro in.

My hotel is just a couple of hundred metres off the Tour’s route on Saturday, so I took that route towards the railway station. There’s immense pride in communities hosting the Tour, even if it just passes through, so there’s a steady stream of workers clearing weeds, wiping down signs and street furniture, and sweeping the road. It’s France’s equivalent of a royal visit.

The train speeds me towards Lille. Like most French trains, even though it effectively just serves a regional commuter route, it’s modern, electric, and double-decker, so there’s plenty of seats, and you get a wonderful elevated view; one of the best aspects of any rail journey is watching the world pass by. In this case it’s a patchwork landscape of countryside and derelict mining areas, punctured by conical mining spoil heaps and their associated small, isolated communities.

After 45 minute we reach the bustling city of Lille - the capital city of the Hauts-de-France region of France, and also the historic capital of Flanders. It’s the fourth-biggest metropolitan area in France. Flanders has a very distinctive character, an amalgamation of centuries of merchant trading, being besieged, war, climate, now extinct industries of textiles, machine engineering, and coal. It has a distinctive architecture, heavily influenced by the Dutch and Bruges styles, but equally in the use of brick in smaller buildings, together with cobbled streets. It has its own accent, distinctive culinary history, famed for its beers, and latterly an obsessive following of cycling. It’s now a European city, exploiting its position at the crossroads of northern Europe.

Everywhere in the city is decorated yellow, but they are still putting out the barriers just a few hours before the Teams’ Presentation. I aim for Vieux-Lille, the old quarter of Lille, walking though the Grand Place where the presentation will take place. It’s empty, save for some people having a coffee at some of the places still open. I’m aiming for the area with a number of Estaminets - possibly nowadays equating to a gastropub, but with none of the pretentiousness, and manage to get a terrace table at Ch’Tite Brigitte, probably the most iconic estaminet of all.

After a local beer I order a Welsh, one of the most best-known Ch’ti dishes. I’m not quite sure what to expect, but know it involves bread, ham and cheese. What arrives is truly amazing - cheese, and then thin slices of rye bread covered in grainy mustard, cheese sauce, ham, more cheese sauce, baked in an oven and topped with cheese. Talking to the barman later, he tells me it traditionally uses Sablé de Wissant cheese - a strong, pungent, artisan cheese with a beer-washed rind, because “cheeses such as Cheddar just aren’t strong enough”. I worry if it’s possible to die from overdosing on cheese, and literally don’t eat another thing for the rest of the day.

 Whilst I’m ploughing through this, just up the road, the whole Movistar team roll into a cafe and have their daily espressos. Such is life when it’s the Tour de France.

After lunch I head to the Fans’ Zone - which is pretty much the Seventh Circle of Hell. It’s full of people trying to blag anything and everything they can - pens, bags, keyrings, hats, stickers. That generally involves queuing up for 10 minutes to ride a bike or spin a wheel to win a bit of tat. Everyone who loves the Tour Caravan concentrated into one place. After literally rubbing shoulders with the Tour’s big boss - Director of Cycling Christian  Prudhomme - I head to the Brompton tent to equally harangue and praise their design and  marketing staff about my Brompton G-Line. Joe - I’m still waiting for you to get back to me.

Then it’s time to wend my way back to the Grand Place for the Teams’ Presentation. It becomes increasingly tortuous as streets get closed off and riders start to appear on the streets. I finally manage to get into the square, push through the crowds and get a space directly underneath the  TV camera platform that has appeared. This does turn out to be a great position as each team’s  spokesman will prove to be directly in front of me. 

First of all there’s nearly two hours of standing, with music banging out, and the ever-growing. crowd squeezing itself into a space that’s really too small. After an interminable show by with break dancers, we’re finally live on French national TV. There’s previews of the race, previews of individual routes, reruns of last year’s race (when Mark Cavendish wins his record-breaking 35th stage win, the crowds’ cheers are deafening and long - they really do love him). There are speeches by local politicians, and an interview with my new best friend Christian Prudhomme. Finally some teams appear. In general these are the ‘lesser’ teams, together with a sprinkling of local teams, such as Arkea B&B Hotels, which receive a massive welcome. I watch Intermarché-Wanty’s Birman Girmay - the Eritrean was the hugely popular winner of last year’s green jersey, the first African rider to achieve this - but then the break dancers are back for their TV debut and I decide it’s time to leave. On the way back to the station I pass teams heading for the platform, including Geraint Thomas, Britain’s last winner of the Tour, who is riding his final Tour, and other local stars such as Remco Evenpoel and Mathieu van de Poel who obviously get huge cheers.

Catch the train back to Lens and walk back to the hotel.

What’s this all about ? New readers start here

I’m sorry, you can’t follow me directly on Blogger - but I will be posting here every day during the Tour. You can also follow me on Bluesky and Facebook to get notifications of new blogs.