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The Tour de France completes its historic passage through Corsica on Monday with a short 145-kilometre third stage from Napoleon Bonaparte’s birthplace in Ajaccio up the island’s west coast to Calvi, where the explorer Christopher Columbus is said to have been born.
To celebrate the 100th staging of the sport’s most famous race, the Tour has come to the Mediterranean island – known as the Island of Beauty – for the first time ever this year.
And so far there has been a controversial opening stage into Bastia followed by a surprise win, and the prize of the yellow jersey, for Belgian Jan Bakelants in Ajaccio on Sunday.
Monday’s stage will feature a second-category climb, 3.3 kilometres long, up the Col de Marsolino 13 kilometres from the finish, while the winding roads up the rugged coastline, and potentially gusting winds, will focus the attention of the peloton throughout a stage that will start at 1055 GMT.
Just like on Saturday and Sunday, the stage is expected to take place under blazing sunshine, with temperatures potentially rising to 27 centigrade.
Organisers will be hoping for another troublefree day, and will have been relieved to hear that Corsican nationalists have lifted their threat to block the starting line in Ajaccio in protest at the arrest of four militants on Saturday night for graffiti-ing parts of the second stage route with anti-French slogans.
The Corsica Libera (Free Corsica) party ended their threat after two of the quartet were released by cops.
The nature of the route means this is a difficult stage to predict, with the almost complete lack of any flat sections potentially opening it up to a puncher.
The French will be hoping for a success for one of their own, perhaps Thomas Voeckler or Sylvain Chavanel, who turned 34 on Sunday, and the overall race leader’s yellow jersey seems set to have a third different wearer in three days.
After arriving in Calvi, the Tour will move to mainland France for the first time, with the fourth stage, a team time-trial, taking place in Nice on Tuesday.
