Bye bye, skis.
The average angle of beginner ski slopes has a grade somewhere between six percent and 25 percent. The lower end of that spectrum doesn’t sound all that intimidating when you’re looking down from the top of a hill covered with snow. But stand at the bottom of that same hill, no snow, and look up. Do that after you’ve been riding a road bike for more than three weeks and a little more than 2,000 miles (~3,500 kilometers). Now, climb that hill on your road bike.
It sounds terrible, doesn’t it?
The final stage of the Tour de France featured a similar climb this year before riders entered the iconic Champs-Élysées sprint finish. Côte de la Butte Montmartre, the section we’re talking about here, is a cobblestone-covered section that runs through Paris with an average gradient of 5.6 percent — nearly as steep as those beginner slopes — and it stretches for approximately one kilometer.
“The climb, better known as Rue Lepic, is steep, narrow and cobbled, meaning that whilst on paper its 1.1km length and 5.9 percent average may not seem too threatening, it’s going to be a real fight, with positioning at the front as tough as trying to climb it with the punchiest riders,” Cycling News wrote about the Stage-21 location just last week.
To demonstrate this, two YouTubers locked into skis that will probably never touch snow again, and descended the cobblestone road in front of hundreds of cycling fans. Yes, they needed a little assistance getting down that tiny little road, but skis obviously weren’t made for gliding over ancient European roads. And Atomic skis hopped into the comments section on Instagram offering a fresh pair to replace them anyway, so the stunt already paid for itself. Either way, climbing up that same road on a road bike doesn’t look nearly as fun as sliding down it with hundreds of people cheering.