Col du Galibier

The Galibier is the high point of the Tour de France's imagination more often than of its route. Henri Desgrange, who founded the race, has his memorial set into the rock a few hundred metres below the summit; the race first crossed here in 1911 and has used the pass more than sixty times since.

From Valloire the road climbs 1,210 metres over seventeen and a half kilometres. The first four are deceptively gentle — two of them under three per cent — running up a broad pastoral valley. At Plan Lachat, roughly eleven kilometres in, the road crosses the stream, turns hard left and starts climbing the wall of the cirque, and from there to the summit at 2,642 metres it does not drop below seven per cent again. Two kilometres touch 9.5.

What makes the Galibier different from a climb of the same length lower down is the altitude at which the hard part happens. The last six kilometres are ridden above 2,200 metres, where power falls away and the difference between a frame that flexes and a frame that does not becomes something the rider can feel.