\n\tVOIRON, France: Dutch corner is known for being the biggest and craziest party in cycling.
Thousands of orange-clad, booze-fueled cycling enthusiasts and young revellers flock to corner seven of Alpe d\u2019Huez every time the Tour de France climbs the iconic mountain.
And they create a unique, noisy and hectic atmosphere \u2014 even by Tour de France mountain pass standards.
This year, the Tour will head up the 21 Alpe d\u2019Huez hairpins on Friday \u2014 and some of the Dutch fans rocking to Europop tunes will have already been there for days by the time the peloton passes.
More Dutch riders have won a Tour de France stage on Alpe d\u2019Huez than any other nationality, including the host country.
For Dutch riders in the Tour, this will be a poignant moment.
\u201cIt\u2019s a super special mountain, of course, Dutch Mountain and the famous corner seven,\u201d said Dutch rider Thymen Arensman before the Tour began.
Arensman has been on Dutch Corner before \u2014 and not just for training rides.
\u201cI have super special memories of this climb because when I was a little kid, like so many other Dutch people, I went there with my parents on holiday,\u201d said the 26-year-old Netcompany Ineos rider, who won two Tour stages last year.
\u201cI was really keen and eager as a little child to do this climb also as fast as possible.
\u201cSo (I have) really good memories there from my childhood.\u201d
Arensman and his Netcompany team-mates trained on the Alpe d\u2019Huez hairpins before the Tour began.
\u201cWe did the climb a few times, but the climb is still just as hard as I remember as a little kid,\u201d he added.
\u201cThe famous corner seven will be amazing.\u201d
Just getting to that point of the race this year will have been no mean feat, given how hard the 113th edition of the Grande Boucle has been.
A suffocating heatwave in the first 10 days, as well as record-breaking speeds have made this Tour tougher than almost any other in history.
But the hardest part of the race was saved for the end, with three consecutive uphill finishes in the Alps before Sunday\u2019s procession around Paris.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u2018Just a lot of suffering\u2019<\/p>\n
\n\tFor some riders, just getting to the end of the Alpe d\u2019Huez stage within the time limit is the goal.
\u201cThe corner will be nice, the rest of the climb I\u2019m not so sure,\u201d Frank van den Broek, riding his third Tour, told AFP.
\u201cIt will depend on how the legs feel and how tight the time limit will be that day.
\u201cBut for sure, the corner, I\u2019m looking forward to (it).\u201d
Daan Hoole, who is a Decathlon CMA CGM team-mate of teenage French prodigy Paul Seixas, is riding his first Tour.
\u201cIt\u2019s a hard stage but it\u2019s special with all the Dutch fans there so that will be for sure nice to see,\u201d he told AFP.
He and his brother used to watch the Tour as children growing up in the Netherlands.
\u201cI dreamed always of the Tour. When I was watching it when I was younger with my brother, the next day we would play on the bike that we are one of these climbers and do like a small race,\u201d he said.
\u201cOnce you\u2019re in it, in your head you can romanticize it a lot, (but) when you\u2019re riding, it\u2019s also just a lot of suffering.\u201d
Now standing almost two meters tall and weighing more than 80kg, Hoole grew too much to be a talented climber.
He is a two-time national time-trial champion.
But as a kid, he dreamed of being like the Schleck brothers from Luxembourg.
\u201cWhen I was starting watching cycling… Andy Schleck was doing really well and my brother was also cycling,\u201d Hoole said of the 2010 Tour champion.
\u201cSo, on the bike, you act a bit (like) you\u2019re the Schleck brothers.
\u201cBut once I became a cyclist, I realized quickly I wasn\u2019t a climber.\u201d
Frank Schleck won a stage atop Alpe d\u2019Huez in 2006, while younger brother Andy rode the mountain in the race leader\u2019s yellow jersey in 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VOIRON, France: Dutch corner is known for being the biggest and craziest party in cycling.Thousands of orange-clad, booze-fueled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[16],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-107288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-alps","tag-alps"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116970392308879440","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}