Riders in this year’s Tour de France will benefit from extended safety zones on seven stages of the race, the UCI announced today.<\/p>\n
It means that instead of the usual three-kilometre buffer at the end of each stage, there will be zones of up to five kilometres from the finish line.<\/p>\n
This year’s Tour de France<\/a> runs from July 5-27, starting on Saturday in Lille and finishing in Paris with a special Montmartre stage<\/a>.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n The safety zones, however long they are, are designed to reduce the danger to riders in lead-up to the final push for the line, taking the pressure off the peloton as a whole to finish at the same time as the winner and let the sprinters do their thing.<\/p>\n It also means that if a rider does crash or suffer a mechanical in the run-in to the line, they will not pay a time penalty \u2013 although a rule tweak introduced this season means that if a rider crashes solo, they won’t benefit.<\/p>\n The stages given extra buffer zones in the <\/strong>Tour de France<\/strong><\/a> this year are: <\/strong><\/p>\n Stage 1: <\/strong>Lille > Lille, +5km<\/p>\n Stage 3:<\/strong> Valenciennes > Dunkerque, +5km<\/p>\n Stage 4:<\/strong> Saint M\u00e9en-le-Grand > Laval, +5km<\/p>\n Stage 9:<\/strong> Chinon > Ch\u00e2teauroux, +5km<\/p>\n Stage 15: <\/strong>Muret > Carcassonne, +4km<\/p>\n Stage 17:<\/strong> Boll\u00e8ne > Valence, +5km<\/p>\n Stage 21:<\/strong> Mantes-la-Ville > Paris Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, +5km<\/p>\n This means the race will be bookended with extra safety measures, from the Grand D\u00e9part in Lille<\/a> to the special 50th anniversary final stage in Paris, which takes in three ascents of the C\u00f4te de la Butte de Montmartre and could be trickier than usual.<\/p>\n It’s also not a great surprise to see the extra safety zones weighted in favour of the first part of the race, which is generally the most nervous and carries the highest crash potential.<\/p>\n