Stage 20: Belfort to Le Markstein Fellering
Date: July 22, 2023
Distance: 133km
Stage type: Mountain
Stage 20 is the penultimate day of racing at the 2023 Tour de France and as Race Director Christian Prudhomme described it, “features an Alsatian menu that is likely to cause indigestion”.
Saturday’s main course is 30km shorter than the day before, but is packed with five categorised climbs and 3,600 metres of climbing. Belfort, which marks a 32nd appearance in the Tour, is only six kilometres away from the first climb, the Ballon d’Alsace (11.5km, 5.3%).
Attacks can then fly over a series of five climbs over the next 55km, two of those categorised – Col de la Croix des Moinats (5.2km, 7%) and Col de Grosse Pierre (3.2km, 8%). After a long descent into Munster, riders tackle the Petit Ballon (9.3km, 8./1%) and the Platzerwasel (7.1km, 8.4%) for the final 8.5km to a new finish on the slopes of the Markstein.
Most recently, Le Markstein, a mountain resort in the Vosges mountains at Fellering, hosted the finish of the penultimate stage of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, where Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar) took the overall lead.
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