Answer to Map #82
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Answer: This week’s map was a dot map depicting all the starting points for stages of the Tour de France over the course of the past decade.
Each year, the Tour de France consists of 21 individual stages held over the course of 23 grueling days. Consequently, this map has 210 dots, though some dots are directly on top of one another because some cities have hosted the beginning of more than one stage.
The Tour de France always finishes in central Paris with a ride down the Champs-Élysées. That means that the final stage begins each year somewhere just outside of Paris. As a result, you see a big cluster of dots in the Parisian suburbs.
You also see clusters of dots in parts of France that are mountainous—particularly in the Alps and the Pyrenees. The Tour de France is an extremely difficult race that involves a lot of racing up and down hills. Each stage is classified as a “flat” stage, a “hilly” stage, or a “mountain” stage. The rider who performs the best on the mountain stages in each Tour de France earns the special title “King of the Mountains.” Some mountain climbs get repeated in different years and have become famous as particularly difficult tests of the riders’ stamina.
As this map makes clear, the Tour de France sometimes begins outside of France. The United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Andorra, and Spain have all hosted stages of the race. The 2018 Tour de France will take place entirely within France, but the 2019 Tour will begin in Brussels.
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