The riders of the Tour de France do not get much choice when it comes to hotels. You might think, given they race for hours each day over gruelling terrain, that they would lay their heads in the best accommodation rural France has to offer. The reality is very different. More often than not, the riders will stay not in palaces, but in whichever budget chain has space for them along the race route.
To paint a picture, these could be a motel-style stop-over on the edge of an autoroute, or a six-floor complex in an industrial estate, next to the petrol stations and fast food outlets just outside a town. Sometimes, sure, they might stay in a country estate, or a boutique hotel in the middle of a city, but it’s very much a lottery. Tadej Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates-XRG, for all the team’s multi-million euro budget, don’t get to stay at endless Malmaisons. Most riders share rooms, too. It’s not a life of luxury.
So how does hotel allocation work? Each year, the Tour’s organiser, ASO, books all the accommodation for the teams, and tries to ensure a fair spread across the three weeks. This means that a team may get a one-star hotel one night, and four-star the next, with all their star tallies supposedly equal come the end of the race.
Each team receives a list of their allocated hotels around spring time, a few months ahead of the Grand Départ. ASO reserves rooms for the riders and a limited number of team support staff. It’s then up to the teams to pay for as many additional rooms as they need, sometimes having to resort to ‘overfill’ hotels as much as 90km away.
This year, over Monday’s rest day, Uno-X Mobility seemed to draw the short straw. The team stayed in a holiday apartment in Le Lioran that, as a video posted by Anders Halland Johannessen on Instagram showed, was filthy and infested with cockroaches. It also had no air conditioning, one of a litany of factors that led the Norwegian to pull his bed onto the balcony and sleep outside.
“It was like 19°C, no wind and quite ambient for a night out under the stars,” he smiled at the start of stage nine in Aurillac.
The Norwegian’s team-mate, Magnus Cort, took a more scathing outlook. The Danish champion has made a name for himself at the Tour thanks to the daily hotel reviews he posts on Instagram. He gave the team’s rest day stop-over a rating of one star out of seven. “It is amongst the worst places I have stayed,” he wrote, singling out the dirtiness, broken toilet roll holder, and “small smell of rot”.
“I can’t find and tag [the hotel] on Instagram,” he added. “Maybe a smart business decision not to be online?”
This year is Cort’s last on the Tour, as his retirement is planned for the end of the season. Speaking to Cycling Weekly, he said the hotels will not be among the things he will miss. What’s the worst place he has slept in across his eight participations? “We stayed in one two years ago that was worse [than Monday night],” he said.
“We stayed in a slightly different part of the hotel, and I don’t know if it was the weather in the different part, but it was a lot more moist there. There was water basically running down the walls. It was really, really nasty there. This time round, it was at least dry, but still dirty.”
Some teams bring their own air conditioning units to the race for nights when they’re given more basic accommodation. New this year, Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates-XRG have been sleeping in near £3,000 ‘smart mattress cover systems’, made by the brand Eight Sleep, which measure the riders’ body temperature and cool the bed accordingly. They came in handy on Monday, when the team found out their three-star hotel near Aurillac didn’t have air conditioning.
George Bennett of NSN Cycling has raced six Tours; in his experience, the gulf between a good hotel and a bad one is “massive”.
“The best are in the Alps; it’s always nice, ski resorts, whatever,” he told Cycling Weekly. “You do get some absolute shitholes. Anything Campanile or Ibis Budget is a massive red flag. The day before the rest day, we had a beautiful château on a golf course, and then the last two days we were in a Campanile with the shutters down because the air con doesn’t work properly. You just roll the dice, you can’t change it.”
Fred Wright and his Pinarello Q36.5 team also missed out on luxury at the end of the Tour’s first week. “I’d like to think every team last night weren’t in great hotels,” he said. “I think it really dipped for everyone. The day before that we were at an amazing golf course – it’s one or the other.”
Despite not being able to change anything, Wright says he tends to do his research on what accommodation he has coming up. “I like to look around the rest days. We’re in a Campanile next week for a few days, but it’s a nice one,” he said. “I already double checked a little bit. You get varying Campaniles, and it’s a good one.”
Logistically, it’s no easy feat for ASO to organise hotels for 180-odd riders and their teams. Sheer luck tends to decide whether the squad is placed somewhere they might holiday, or whether the option is so bad they chose to sleep outside. For the riders, tired after each day’s racing, there’s always a hope the team bus rolls up to somewhere nice for an evening. If not, at least they can take comfort in the fact that tomorrow might be better.
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