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Organisers of the Tour de France announced on Saturday that the route for the Monday, July 4 stage 3 from Amorebieta-Etxano to Bayonne has been changed.
The route will detour around a section in the final 30 kilometres that contained numerous “urban improvements” including traffic circles, traffic islands, and speed bumps.
The so-called ‘road furniture’ has made road cycling in urban centres more dangerous, with traffic calming measures designed to slow vehicles down leading to crashes.
The announcement did not explicitly state that the change was part of the UCI’s new SafeR project that is aimed at improving safety for men’s and women’s road races.
That initiative was rolled out following the tragic death of Swiss rider Gino Mäder during the Tour de Suisse.
CPA president Adam Hansen has been actively engaging with the Tour de France organisers ASO, successfully negotiating added signalling and padding on barriers on the downhill finishes of stages 14 and 17.
The change comes after Saint-Pée-Sur-Nivelle at kilometre 162.4 and adds 6.1 kilometres to the stage. The distance is now 193.5km instead of 187.4 km.
Rather than head from Saint-Pée-Sur-Nivelle on route D3 the race will instead travel on the more major route D918 until Souraïd, where the riders will head toward Bayonne on route D88.
The detour adds a trip through Ustaritz before riders pick up the previously planned stage 3 route for the run-in to Bayonne.
The profile of the final 31.1km is altered only slightly, with two back-to-back uncategorized minor climbs before and after Souraïde rather than a single more sustained ascent.
