This year’s Tour de France will cover 3,600 kilometres [2,236 miles], including some of the most fearsome climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees. It’s one of the toughest Tours in years, and yet perhaps the moment the peloton has been fearing most will arrive at about 4.30pm today, in between one bleak post-industrial town in southern Belgium and another in northern France. This is when the Tour hits the cobbles. Lance Armstrong predicted last week that there would be carnage and he wasn’t exaggerating. Â
Riding on cobbles might not sound as difficult as all that, but these are far from the perfectly ordered rows of neatly carved elongated ovals you might find in any city centre seeking to give itself an olde-worlde air. Rather they will  … Details