Ventoux return, Cavendish City, Jonathan Milan debut, two sets of twins, new kits, Montmartre – 15 things to look out for at Tour de France 2025
Updated 04/07/2025 at 11:12 GMT+1
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The return of Mont Ventoux and the Col de la Loze, Montmartre on the final day in Paris, a 50th finish on the Champs-Elysees, debuts for Jonathan Milan and Florian Lipowitz, a climb named after a five-time champion, two sets of twins, and a final farewell for Geraint Thomas... Here is a selection of eye-catching things to look out for this July during the 112th edition of the Tour de France.
'I think Tadej will be very good in the Tour' - Vingegaard wary of rival Pogacar's form
Video credit: TNT Sports
With the Tour de France getting under way in Lille on Saturday, July 5, live on TNT Sports and discovery+, it’s not long until the wait is over and Tadej Pogacar resumes his scintillating rivalry with Jonas Vingegaard, while the rest of the peloton battle to keep in touch and leave their own imprint on the 112th edition of the Grande Boucle.
We have looked at the key stages in the 2025 Tour and have ranked the yellow jersey contenders and rivals for the green jersey competition. Now it’s time to take a sideways glance at the next three weeks in July with a checklist of things to keep a look out for at the world’s biggest bike race.
The return of Mont Ventoux
Not since Chris Froome sailed clear of Nairo Quintana a mind-boggling 12 years ago have we enjoyed a finish on the summit of Mont Ventoux. Yes, we witnessed Froome running up the Bald Mountain to Chalet Reynard after Thomas De Gendt won the shortened stage in 2016, plus the double ascent of the Giant of Provence in 2021 – by which time Froome was a busted flush.
But, if all goes well, Stage 16 this July will conclude with the Tour’s 10th finish on Mont Ventoux – and the first during the Pogacar-Vingegaard era. Get the popcorn ready.
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A moment in Tour history: Chris Froome runs up Mont Ventoux
Image credit: Getty Images
Climbs that put Pogacar under pressure
Pogacar found some redemption during the Criterium du Dauphine when he won at Combloux on the same climb where he shipped 1’38" to Vingegaard during the only time trial in the 2023 Tour. The Slovenian will now have the chance to bury his demons on two more climbs where he has previously struggled.
First up, Hautacam on Stage 12, the Pyrenean ascent where he lost 1’04" to the Dane in 2022. Then it’s the interminable Col de la Loze, where the world champion has twice been found wanting on its inconsistent gradients. Unlike the two previous occasions, however, the highest point in this year’s race will be approached from the supposedly easier western side via the ski resort of Meribel.
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Best of 2023: Jumbo-Visma line road to celebrate Vingegaard's yellow jersey
Video credit: TNT Sports
New jerseys galore
The clash between their usual yellow colours and the yellow which Jonas Vingegaard often wears at the Tour de France means Visma-Lease a Bike have gone down their habitual route of introducing more black to their jerseys this July. But they’re not the only team with a sartorial shake-up.
Primoz Roglic’s Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe have borrowed the old Jayco-AlUla shorts and matched them with a nice white jersey with a zany blue, orange and red offset pinstripe. It’s a definite improvement on their usual togs and will make their riders stand out in the pack.
Once again, Israel-Premier Tech have come up with a stylish limited-edition jersey, which blends pinks and blues, while Groupama-FDJ have also opted for an asymmetrical design with one red shoulder set against their usual blue fade.
But Ineos Grenadiers have made a Total hash of their kit, which has simply borrowed a white panel with the TotalEnergies logo and plastered it across their normal design. There's also a white panel on the top of the back of the shorts. Urgh.
What a mess. What a way to taint Geraint Thomas’s last Tour…
Goodbye G, and thanks for the memories
Seven years after he won the world’s biggest bike race, Geraint Thomas makes his 14th and final appearance in the Tour. The 39-year-old Welshman made the podium in 2022 but is unlikely to ride for general classification this summer. Instead, Thomas will provide support for Ineos Grenadiers leader Carlos Rodriguez while trying to go out with a bang.
Thomas, who will be the oldest rider taking to the start in Lille, made his debut in 2007 and no other rider in this year's peloton featured in the Tour until 2013. Victory on one of the six summit finishes would be a nice way for the 2018 champion to sign off in style ahead of his impending retirement.
Milan makes his debut
On what would seem to be a tailor-made course for Mads Pedersen, it is instead the Danish puncheur’s Lidl-Trek team-mate Jonathan Milan who gets the nod to make his long-awaited Tour debut. The 24-year-old Italian has won the maglia ciclamino on both his appearances in the Giro d’Italia, notching four stage wins in the process. Milan now has the chance to shine on the biggest stage at all – the Tour de France, where he could take an opening day yellow.
Other notable Tour debutants are Milan’s young team-mate Thibau Nys, fellow sprinter Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Norwegian all-rounder Tobias Foss (Ineos Grenadiers), Colombian climber Einer Rubio (Movistar), Irish climber Eddie Dunbar (Jayco-AlUla), Italian domestique Edoardo Affini (Visma-Lease a Bike) and the German white jersey contender Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe).
All in all, there are 49 debutants on the start list for Lille, and they also include some names who, incredibly, have never tasted a day on the Tour before – such as Dutchman Thymen Arensman (Ineos Grenadiers) and Ecuador’s Jhonatan Narvaez (UAE Team Emirates-XRG).
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'No competition' - Milan takes yellow from Pogacar after dominant Stage 2 sprint
Video credit: TNT Sports
First mountain time trial since 2020
Five years after Pogacar wrote himself into the record books with victory in the Stage 20 time trial at La Planche des Belle Filles – to wrest the yellow jersey off the shoulders of his compatriot Primoz Roglic – a mountaintop time trial features on the parcours.
Stage 13 to Peyragudes is a 10.9km race of truth that plays out almost entirely on the western side of the Col de Peyresourde before a detour up the steep ramped climb of the Altiport at Peyragudes. Get your stopwatches ready.
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Tour de France 2025 Stage 13 ITT profile
Image credit: ASO
A nod to ‘Maitre Jacques’ in the opening week
The fourth stage to Rouan features over 2,000m of vertical gain and packs five categorised climbs in the last quarter – starting off with the Category 4 Cote Jacques Anquetil. At just 3.6% for 3.5km it’s arguably one of the easiest categorised climbs in the entire Tour – but it gets its name from the five-time Tour champion Anquetil, who owned land and a castle on the hill.
Frenchman Warren Barguil (Picnic PostNL) currently has the KOM jersey which he claimed in 2021 but that will no doubt change on July 8. Keep your eyes out for the lavish monument dedicated to Anquetil at the summit just outside the town of La Neuville-Chant-d'Oisel, the location of the Chateau Anquetil (which is now a wedding venue).
Tour route guru swings by his home
Two days after the Rouen stage, the Tour heads to Vire Normandie, the hometown of the man who designs the Tour route each year. It’s a lumpy stage through Normandy that starts in the hometown of Kevin Vauquelin, Bayeux, and finishes – after six categorised climbs and a total of 3,550m vertical gain later – in the backyard of Thierry Gouvenou.
The chief route designer promises fireworks in Stage 6 and has promised that his entire family will be at the finish to cheer the riders home. Interestingly, Gouvenou’s first ever Tour stage as a rider was a prologue time trial in Lille, won by his GAN team-mate Chris Boardman 31 years ago. Over three decades on, the Tour returns for another Grand Depart in the city in northern France.
Two sets of twins on the Tour
While Giro champion Simon Yates will be doing his best to see Visma-Lease a Bike team-mate Vingegaard back to winning ways, twin brother Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) will be pushing for Pogacar’s fourth triumph - two years after the brothers from Bury battled out in Bilbao on the first day of the 2023 Tour, with Adam taking the win and yellow jersey.
A second set of twins will turn out for the same Uno-X Mobility team, with Tobias Johannessen – fifth in the Dauphine – joined by Anders, who makes his Grand Tour debut.
A third set of brothers are present in the form of the Paret-Peintres, with Valentin part of Remco Evenepoel’s mountain train at Soudal Quick-Step and older brother Aurelien named in Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale’s squad to support Felix Gall.
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Adam and Simon Yates during the 21st stage of the Giro de Italia 2025
Image credit: Getty Images
Abrahamsen to ride through the pain
Just nine days after he broke his collarbone in the opening stage of the Baloise Belgium Tour, Norway’s Jonas Abrahamsen was named in Uno-X Mobility’s squad. The 29-year-old was a regular fixture in breakaways in last year’s Tour and enjoyed stints in both the green and polka dot jersey.
The heavy fall less than two weeks before the start of the Tour looked certain to have sidelined Abrahamsen from the race. But "against all odds" he has been passed fit to ride by a specialist fracture clinic in Manchester. Given the seriousness of the injury, however, you’d expect Abrahamsen to perhaps take more of a backseat in the opening week of the race this July – even if he did post a video of himself on the turbo trainer a day after his operation.
A visit to Foret’s hometown
Who is Joseph Foret? Funny you should ask. He’s one of the most influential people in the cultural movement of the Tour de France and someone you’ve almost certainly never heard of. The late art publisher – who worked with the likes of Salvador Dali, Bernard Buffet and Tsuguharu Foujita – became part of the Tour furniture between the years 1948 and 1961, when he travelled around in the race publicity caravan, La Caravane Du Tour, sending postcards to subscribers from each start and finish town.
Foret, a keen cyclist who used to ride for the prestigious Velo Club de Levallois in Paris, commissioned 12 series of official Tour de France postcards in collaboration with many of the artists he worked with – most notably, Dali, whose famous ink drawing of a cyclist was part of the 1959 collection.
Stage 10 of the race this year finishes in the town of Mont-Dore in the Massif Central, where Foret was brought up by his grandparents before moving to Paris aged 18.
Although largely forgotten today, Foret left an indelible imprint on the cultural heritage of the Tour de France. For 12 years, this philatelist made the Tour his own private stamping ground, adding an unprecedented and unrepeated artistic dimension to the race, one that still inspires today.
A fast finish in Cavendish City
Three of Mark Cavendish’s record 35 stage wins on the Tour – in 2008, 2011 and 2021 – came on the Avenue de la Chatre in Chateauroux, so it’s understandable why the city in the centre of France has momentarily renamed itself Cavendish City ahead of the Tour’s visit on Sunday, July 13.
Stage 9 is the only stage in the entire race with no categorised climbs – the kind of stage that suits a pure sprinter like Cavendish to a tee. So it’s only natural that we should see the likes of Milan, Jasper Philipsen and Tim Merlier – the race's three fastest finishers – battle for the win there when the Tour comes to town.
Champs-Elysees celebrates its 50th anniversary
Talking of Cavendish, four of the Manx Missiles Tour stage wins came on the Champs-Elysees, which this July will play host to its 50th finish. With the exception of last year’s time trial in Nice – which came about because of the preparations for the Paris 2024 Olympics – the French capital’s famous cobblestone boulevard has hosted every final stage of the Tour since its inauguration in 1975, when Belgium’s Walter Godefroot took the spoils.
Everyone has had their stand-out moment on the Champs-Elysees – whether it’s Greg LeMond’s nail-biting time trial win over Laurent Fignon, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov's collision with the barriers, Alexandre Vinokourov’s opportunism or one from that sequence of Cavendish’s wins (most likely when Bradley Wiggins, in yellow, led him out in 2012).
But there’s a huge chance that we won’t witness a bunch sprint on the Champs-Elysees on Sunday July 27. That’s because this year it returns, but with a twist…
Butte de Montmartre detour in Paris
Such was the success of the Olympic road races that the Tour organisers couldn’t resist borrowing some of the route one year on. In a huge break with tradition, the final processional stage into Paris won’t simply conclude with eight of the famous city centre loops ahead of an expected bunch sprint on the Champs-Elysees.
Instead, after four laps of the usual circuit, the riders will tackle three laps of a second circuit that takes the riders through the heart of Paris, past Pigalle and up the Butte de Montmartre via the narrow Rue Lepic (of Amelie fame). The circuit takes the peloton back to the Champs-Elysees each time, but given the difficulty of the climb and the technical nature of the descent, it’s unlikely that we’ll see the entire pack contest the finish as one.
This bodes well for opportunists and breakaway artists on a final day, usually the reserve of the sprinters. And if it’s seconds – not minutes – separating the top two going into the final stage, the usual unwritten rule of no attacks from the GC riders will surely go out the window.
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'An iconic image' - Evenepoel with memorable celebration after sealing double gold
Video credit: TNT Sports
Eleven Britons competing – the same as last year
The eleventh-hour additions of Sam Watson and Connor Swift to Ineos Grenadiers’ roster means 11 British riders will feature in the 184-man startlist. That matches what was already a record last year, and makes Great Britain, alongside Italy (11; up three), the joint-fourth most represented nation after France (38; up six), Belgium (29; up one) and the Netherlands (13; down one).
The 11 Britons taking part are Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike), Thomas, Swift and Watson (all Ineos Grenadiers), Lewis Askey (Groupama-FDJ), Sean Flynn and Oscar Onley (Picnic PostNL), Fred Wright (Bahrain-Victorious), Joseph Blackmore and Jake Stewart (both Israel-Premier Tech).
Four of the above are making their Tour debut – Askey, Flynn, Blackmore and Watson – with newly-crowned British national champion Watson one of 12 national road race champions competing, alongside nine national TT champions.
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