The Tour de France start’s winding road to the streets of Copenhagen takes another turn and is moved from 2021 to 2022.
This is announced by Frank Jensen, Copenhagen’s Lord Mayor and Chairman of the Board of the company behind the Danish Tour start, to DR Sporten. The new dates will be July 1, 2, and 3, 2022.
– I am really happy that the partner company has now managed to agree on a solution: We say yes thanks to moving the tour to 2022, says Frank Jensen to DR Sporten.
It costs about 5.8 million kroner extra to move the Tour start a year, and that bill will be shared between ASO, the organizer of the Tour de France, and the Danish stakeholders. However, ASO does not want to say what the distribution looks like, says Frank Jensen.
The extra costs that arise for the individual Danish start and finish cities must be covered by the municipalities themselves. And they have all said yes to that today, it sounds.
The Danish organizers were left with three options: moving the race one week, a yes to 2022 or a rejection of the world’s largest bicycle race. Here, the choice fell on the middle scenario, and Frank Jensen is happy that all parties managed to reach an agreement so that the Tour goes to Denmark.
– We must arm ourselves with more patience and rejoice for a longer period of time, but it is an advantage that the Tour is less pressured by both other events and the corona epidemic, he says.
How close has it been that the Tour did not come to Denmark?
– We have been out there where we were at the edge in relation to whether we could complete the Tour in Denmark, says Frank Jensen, who has recently worked to pull the Danish race start away from the aforementioned edge.
– We would not go there, now that we have for the first time ever managed to have such a big sporting event in Denmark. We did not want to bring Denmark to where we had to say no thanks to the French, says Frank Jensen.
Grand Depart Copenhagen states that no changes are expected in the three Danish stages as a result of the postponement. The plan is still for the first stage to be a single start in Copenhagen, the second stage from Roskilde to Nyborg, while the third stage stretches from Vejle to Sønderborg.
‘There was no other resort’
The reason for the move is overlapping in the Danish hosts at the European Championship finals in football and the world’s largest cycling race next summer, which became a reality when the International Cycling Union, UCI, announced last week that the Tour 2021 will run from 26 June to 18. July. A direct consideration for the Olympics , it read in the justification.
Thus, the yellow bicycle caravan should have rolled through the capital, at the same time as Eriksen, Schmeichel and the rest of the men’s national team are chasing EC metal on Danish soil – and there was no room for that, assesses DR Sport’s commentator, Henrik Liniger.
– The Danish Tour start had ended in a situation where it could not be different than having to make a different decision than the original. There has been pressure from the Olympic Games, the European Championships in football and the Tour move, so there was no other resort left, says Henrik Liniger.
