Tour de France 2022, stage five
Distance: 157km
Start location: Lille Métropole
Finish location: Arenberg Porte du Hainaut
Start time: 12.35 BST
Finish time (approx): 16.20 BST
Eighteen years have passed since the very last lump of coal was mined from France. An industry that once employed 300,000 people and excavated 60 million tonnes of dusty black carbon, mainly in the north and east of the country, gradually dwindled to nothing, under the twin pressures of cheap imports and the environmental impact of burning it. The coal industry had been an engine of social and industrial revolution, but couldn’t survive beyond the turn of the 21st century.
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The landscape of the Nord département, largely flat, with gentle undulations and large expanses of forest between the urban conurbations of Lille, Roubaix and Valenciennes, still bears the marks of its mining history, with rusting pitheads standing like gravestones to an entire industry and spoil heaps quietly rewilding as the local tourist authorities repurpose them as beauty spots. This is a complex region. Nord is France’s most populous département, and one still in transition from its industrial past. The coal mines and the textile factories of Lille have closed, and while money is flooding into Lille, with its Eurostar station, the European City of Culture designation in 2004 and its university (the third largest in France), the rest of the region still struggles to adjust to the modern age.
The tension between past and present in Nord might find expression in the fifth stage of the 2022 Tour de France, which starts in Lille and finishes in the mining town of Arenberg, in the shadow of the town’s 60-metre tall pithead. The riders will be more scientifically well trained and prepared than they have ever been before; their equipment much improved even on the bikes of 10 years ago. They will take advantage of technology – race radios, weather apps, mapping apps – that has made them better informed than ever and would have been unimaginable to the peloton of the early Tour de France. And yet the stage will be a throwback to a past era of cycling.
While the département strives to modernise and to move on from its industrial past, a small number of its ancient roads are deliberately…