“I can’t take a road without thinking about the Tour”: detours around France with Thierry Gouvenou, the man who maps out the route of the Tour de France

"Here, we'll start from Bessin, the region around Bayeux, a limestone land with apple trees. Then we'll head towards Swiss Normandy before tackling the bocage and its granite soil..." When we ask Thierry Gouvenou to tell us about the sixth stage of the Tour de France, which crosses a part of Normandy, we have the impression of opening an atlas of natural regions. The man who maps out the route of the Grande Boucle , number 2 in the organization of the event behind King Christian Prudhomme, is obsessed with geography. Obviously: for two decades, he has been working to map out the routes of the Tour. Dozens and dozens of stages before the one this Thursday, July 10, a little more special than the others: it arrives in Vire Normandie (Calvados), where Gouvenou was born, fifty-six years ago.

Last March, he had a glimpse of the emotion that might grip him when the riders pass the red flame, near the Gare district. Thierry Gouvenou went to Vire, to the Saint-Joseph school, for the Dictée du Tour, an event organized with schoolchildren. "I read it in the class where I was a kid. It's been rearranged a bit, but who cares?"