The Tour de France 2023 is like none other in recent history. It starts in the Basque Country, in Bilbao, with hard technical stages. It counts eight mountain stages. Four of those are summit finishes and then only 22 kilometers of time trialing in this year's edition. And that's a low amount of time trialing compared to recent years. It's going to be a doozy of a race.

We should see a really exciting race as we don't have much time trial kilometers. We will see a lot of attacks in the mountains from the important guys, like Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) and Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates). 

And there's also some big names missing for good reason. Geraint Thomas (INEOS Grenadiers), Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quick Step), and Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) decided to race the Giro d'Italia due to its large number of time trial kilometers. The later went on to win over Thomas. This Tour only offers 22 kilometers of time traveling in one stage, and it's a small uphill finish or practically a mountain time trial.

The Tour de France 2023 Is Packed With Mountain Stages

And we'll have many exciting mountain stages, for example the Col de la Loze or the Puy de Dôme stage, which is a mythical climb. And even the Grand Colombier, which is a 17-kilometers long summit finish. So it will be a demanding Tour, and an exciting to watch.

And then we have these kind of stages that you might overlook on paper when you're studying at the road book. And in those stages we have that stage 20, where traditionally the organizers would put a time trial on that penultimate day before they transfer to Paris for the finish. Instead of a time trial, we have a stage that has 4000 meters of climbing! The Le Markstein stage looks more like Liège-Bastogne-Liège. They used it last year to help decide the women's Tour de France. 

We'll see an exciting race from the first stage to this last. And it's going to be a hard stage and a kind of stage where anything can happen. Riders from the top ten will try everything and go for the podium because it's their last chance and they have a really hard the stage to make something happen. And not only that, the riders who are third or fourth could perhaps even leapfrog their rivals, and who knows, win the Tour de France on that stage 20.

Vingegaard has a good chance to defend his title or Pogacar is a third title, but with this Tour de France route, anything and everything can happen.

The Tour de France 2023 Route