Hills The Focus In Next Year's Tour De France

The 2015 Tour de France will involve three countries and lots of mountains, organizers announced Wednesday, unveiling the route of the 102st edition of the race. Next year's action begins in the Dutch city of Utrecht.

The 2015 route of the Tour de France sees more mountain stages and far less emphasis on time trials. But there are plenty of opportunities for sprinters to shine and potential traps, including a return to tricky cobblestone roads in northeast France, could trip up race favorites.



The race is scheduled to start on July 4, 2015 and will end in Paris on July 26. From Utrecht the riders will cross south into Belgium and then France, where they will follow the coast west to Brittany. The cyclists will then fly south to Pau for the second part of the race in the Pyrenees and the Alps.



Organizers want time trialing, a specialist discipline which tends to favor more powerful and durable individual riders, to play less of a role in the eventual outcome of the Tour.



"Very often, the time trial blocks the race," said the Tour's director, Christian Prudhomme. "After the inaugural time-trial there will be 10 days of plains and 10 days of mountains."



Chris Froome, the 2013 Tour de France champion and a strong time-trialer, suggested the changes could lead him to skip the Tour de France and concentrate instead on the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a Espana.



"Next year's Tour is going to be about the mountains," the Team Sky rider said on his website. "There's very little emphasis on time trialing, which means the race will be decided up in the high mountains. With six mountaintop finishes it is going to be an aggressive and massively demanding race."



The penultimate stage takes place with the Alpe d'Huez peak, with its 21 hairpin bends, before the traditional race finish on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.



al/ (AP, dpa)