France · Alps
Alpe d'Huez
The 21 numbered bends of Alpe d'Huez are cycling's most famous climb. Each hairpin bears the name of a Tour de France stage winner.
- Length
- 13.8 km
- Avg gradient
- 8.1%
- Max gradient
- 13%
- Elevation gain
- 1,118 m
- Summit
- 1,860 m
- Hairpins
- 21
Versants
- From Le Bourg-d'Oisans — 13.8 km at 8.1% (max 13%)
History
Alpe d'Huez hosted the Tour de France's first-ever mountaintop finish in 1952 — Fausto Coppi won it, the same year he'd go on to win the whole Tour. Tour director Jacques Goddet liked the idea enough to want it back, but the climb didn't become a fixture until 1976; since then it's featured more than 30 times; and it's carried the Tour to some of its most-replayed days.
The 21 hairpins are the whole identity of the place. They're numbered on yellow signs, counting down from 21 at the base to 1 at the summit, each one naming a past stage winner — a rolling monument you climb through rather than past. Bend 7 is Dutch Corner, and the nickname stuck for a reason: between 1977 and 1989, eight of fourteen stage winners on the Alpe were Dutch — Joop Zoetemelk, Hennie Kuiper, Peter Winnen, Steven Rooks, Gert-Jan Theunisse among them — and Dutch fans have turned that one hairpin into one of the loudest, most orange corners in cycling every time the race comes back.
None of that changes what the climb actually asks of you: 13.8 km at 8.1% from Bourg-d'Oisans, with ramps into double digits early on, before the road settles into the switchbacks that made it famous.