Tour de France: the 104th edition starts in Düsseldorf

Germany – 1 July 2017:
The 198 riders of the Tour de France, including the outgoing winner Chris Froome, start Saturday in the first stage, a 14-km time trial in Düsseldorf, Germany, where safety measures are maximum in a context of Permanent terrorist threat.

Other specialists to watch out for include 23-year-old Swiss hopeful Stefan Küng, Dutchman Jos van Emden, Slovenian Primoz Roglic and Spain's Jonathan Castroviejo.
For the final victory in Paris, the contenders are numerous this year. Froome, the strongman of his two consecutive victories, is obviously headlining. His former lieutenant, the Australian Richie Porte, however, passes for one of his most serious rivals.

The winner will have the honor of wearing the first yellow jersey of the 104th edition of the Grande Boucle, the biggest cycling race in the world. In front of his audience, German timing expert Tony Martin, four times world champion of the specialty, is a favorite.

The French, for their part, will have Chimène's eyes for Romain Bardet, second last year, while Colombia hopes that its national hero Nairo Quintana will become the first Latin American rider to win the Tour. Without forgetting the usual Spanish Alberto Contador, double winner of the event (2007, 2009), who can speak his experience in a race that is announced very tactical.

The Tour will enter France on Monday, after a second Sunday stage that will lead the peloton to Liège, Belgium.

- GIGN and sniffer dogs -
On the Düsseldorf stage, the organizers are expecting a human tide. And in the context of terrorist attacks in Western Europe over the last few months, the authorities have taken exceptional security measures.
The entire perimeter of the race will have barriers and the arteries leading to the course will be closed, barred if necessary by containers to prevent a crazy truck from rushing into the crowd.

When the race arrives in France, 13,000 gendarmes, 10,000 policemen, a GIGN detachment, and dog teams to detect possible explosives will secure it, over the course of three weeks.

The departure of Düsseldorf is the fourth Grand Départ of Germany. In total, the Tour has launched 22 times from abroad, including six times in the last ten years. The French always represent the largest contingent of the pack.

The race will go through the five mountainous massifs of the hexagon: the Vosges, the Jura, the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and the Alps, where the final victory should take place before the time trial of Marseille on the eve of the 'Arrival on the Champs-Élysées.
The organizers sought to trace a nervous and atypical course, to prevent one or two teams from locking the race and keeping the suspense as long as possible.

Between two massifs, the baroudeurs and the sprinteurs will of course take their share of glory. The world champion, the fantastic Slovak Peter Sagan, is in a position to equal the record of the German Erik Zabel with a sixth green jersey (points classification).
But the elite of the world sprint, Kittel, Greipel, Cavendish, Demare or Bouhanni, will be there to dispute the supremacy over the arrivals in the plain.