This Sunday, July 27, the Grande Boucle ends on the Champs Élysées. This year, according to an IPSOS BVA-CESI survey Schools of engineers carried out for La Tribune on Sunday, the Tour was very followed by the French public. The latter consider competition as an integral part of the heritage.
From the road to the TV audiences, the 112nd edition of the Tour de France brings together more and more French. And this, despite the suspense dissipated by the Slovenian champion Tadej Pogacar, from the mid-term. Departing from the Grande Boucle in Lille on July 5, more than a million people were identified.
This Sunday, July 27, before completing its race on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, the Tour will stop by the Butte Montmartre, as during the 2024 Olympic Games. And in front of the race, from everyone’s confession, there have been so many people.
“If I am told for me five times a day, it is that it must be true and it is the feeling that I also have,” smiled Christian Prudhomme, the boss of the Grande Boucle, during the passage in the Pyrenees.
According to an IPSOS BVA-Cessi School of Engineering, carried out for the gallery on Sunday, nearly six in ten French people (58%), all ages, generations and social classes combined, declare that they have followed the Tour de France, and even assiduously for 23% of them.
The Tour is part of the French heritage
According to Pierre Latrille, director of studies at ISPOS, the large loop “goes beyond the bicycle”. And despite the absence of French runners among the favorites of the event, none has won for forty years and yet, it arouses a lot of interest, “he said.
For 91% of respondents, the Tour de France is part of the French heritage. Besides, to the question, “what interests you most when you look at the Tour de France”, 63% of those questioned answer “landscapes and comments on heritage”.
“This meeting, accessible and free, between sport and the people is unique, there is no more heritage than that”, confides Yann Le Bourbouac’h, producer of the series “Tour de France – at the heart of the peloton” broadcast on Netflix for three years, in the gallery on Sunday.
An event that makes you want to cycle
Bike has become a fashionable sport and affects a young audience. According to the survey carried out by Ipsos BVA-Ci-Cesi School of Engineers, 59% of the under 35s were interested in the big loop this summer: motivated above all by the atmosphere, the animations and the popular side of the event.
In addition, the practice of cycling is clearly increasing. It would be the equivalent of “tennis in the 1980s or golf in the 2000s”, analyzes with the Tribune on Sunday, Virgile Caillet, general delegate of Union Sport & Cycle.
Moreover, according to the 38% survey of those questioned want to cycle by looking at the big loop. Cyclotourists now want to rub shoulders with the peloton nightmares, like Mont Ventoux increasingly attended.
