Welcome back to the Lantern Rouge cycling podcast with Benji Nice and the off-season has truly begun.

This is our Tour de France 2021 route. Not really a preview, kind of a recap of the route announcement

that came out a couple of weeks ago. Have you been going, Benji?

I mean, I presume you followed the announcement a little bit where you...

What was your initial gut reaction when you saw the profiles?

I'm not necessarily overly disappointed. I didn't really have any preparation of thoughts beforehand.

So I wasn't like, I want to see this kind of mount stage or this kind of mount stage.

I mainly wanted a parkour that fitted a number of riders and would be entertaining to watch from start to finish.

And that's something that I think every find wants on cycling.

For me, it doesn't really matter who comes out on top at the end of a ground tour.

If an evil is not contending, there is no real queen mount stage where I'm like,

boom, that's a stage. But we're going to add in a second, I think that is basically my first thoughts on it.

I mean, then my thoughts were kind of similar. It was just like, okay, few things changed, few things different,

but classic Tour de France route where it's nothing...

You can't put your finger on a stage and say, as you said, Benji, you can't say that stage

there is going to be a massive GC split like in Stelvio Hero stage.

And I think it was unusual that ASO chose one to announce this Tour de France route when they did.

I mean, they announced it. I think in like the start of the last week of the welter,

where everyone was sick of cycling. I think that a lot of the fans were oversaturated with cycling content.

But even following the races was hard. And I think they announced it.

I don't know why they announced it then. I think it would have been a lot more interesting buzz.

In this week, because no one's got anything else to talk about and to look at in cycling.

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