Updated throughout the day with quick takes from staff.
Take your friends who think cycling is for pansies and Euro-ninnies and throw them off the nearest stairwell or raised overpass. This is the 100th anniversary of the first Tour de France run there, so lucky you, cycling pain junkies: you get to celebrate it by experiencing the “Circle of Death,” a series of four soul-breaking climbs in the Pyrenees, last run in 1910 as part of the first tour to go through the mountains bordering Spain and France.
The crushing climbs will be run in succession, including the 7,000 foot climb up the Tournalet, which will be run twice. If this all sounds like the far end of human pain tolerance, it is. When first run in 1910, the stage winner, Octave Lapize, had this to say to the race organizers.
Lapize’s judgment of the course’s designers has become part of Tour legend: “You are assassins, yes, assassins.”
It also means one of the rougher TDF courses in recent history, a race already recognized as one of the premiere endurance events on the planet. (By premiere, we mean “heart-exploding.”)
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