Tour de France starts in Utrecht with a 14 km individual race
Next year’s Tour de France cycle race will start in the Dutch city of Utrecht with a 13.7 kilometre individual time trial, the event’s organisers said on Wednesday.
Plans for next year’s big race were unveiled in Paris and the Utrecht sprint is the only individual time trial of the competition.
The second Dutch leg of the Tour de France consists of a race to the Zeeland island of Neeltje Jans, which forms part of the country’s flood defences, from where the cyclists will head into Belgium.
This is the sixth time a Dutch city has hosted the start of the epic race. Amsterdam hosted the first non-French Grand Départ in 1954. The capital was followed by Scheveningen (1973), Leiden (1978), Den Bosch (1996) and Rotterdam (2010).
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