The postponed 2020 Tour de France will go ahead this summer, but will have a revised start date following the governments extension on the ban of public events.
The Tour De France, which is the pinnacle of the cycling annul calendar, was initially meant to run from the end of June into the middle of July.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the lockdown in France will begin to relax on May 11, but major events would continue to be banned until at least mid-July.
The Tour de France is not the only major sporting event to be impacted either, with the Formula One French Grand Prix set to be postponed too.
“Holding this event in the best conditions possible is judged essential given its central place in cycling’s economy,” said the sport’s governing body the UCI.
Four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome is set to return to the Tour this year having missed the 2019 edition following a horror crash.
He had his say on the postponement of the tour, tweeting: “The news many of us have been waiting for. Some light at the end of the tunnel.”
The other main races in the cycling calendar, namely the Giro D’Italia and the Vuelta a Espana have also been postponed as part of a plan by UCI to stage the whole calendar late in the year.
The Road World Championships set to take place in Switzerland are will be held in late September. As it stands, that is not going to change.
The other two Grand Tour races in Italy and Spain will both be held after September’s World Championships.
Meanwhile, the postponed monument one day races – Milan-San Remo, Liege-Bastonge-Liege, Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix – “will all take place this season, at dates still to be defined”, according to the UCI statement.
The UCI also made it clear that the new calendar is of course dependent on the “World health situation”.
Things are still very much up in the air as to when life will be able to return to normal, but at the moment it seems a long way off.
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