The route planners of the Tour de France have always had a sadistic edge, but it took them 110 years from the race’s inception to find the courage to send the peloton to the rough roads, precipices and primitive landscapes of the Col de Sarenne.
This notoriously wild col, which forms part of the hulking Grandes Rousses massif in the French region of Isère, provides a ‘back door’ route to the cycling legend of Alpe d’Huez. But when the Sarenne appeared in the Tour for the first time, in the centenary edition of 2013, the pro riders were not happy.
The climb itself – 958m of altitude gain over 12.8km with an average gradient of 7.5% and sharp ramps at 14.1% – would have been brutal enough, but the problem was that
