The Olympic colors, characteristic of the cycling world champion’s jersey, will float over Haute-Savoie. France will host the World Cycling Championships in the Alps in 2027, the International Cycling Union (UCI) announced on Thursday at its congress held on the sidelines of the World Championships in Wollongong, Australia. France and the Netherlands were the two countries in the running to win these “Super Worlds”, now bringing together every pre-Olympic year all the disciplines of cycling, from road to BMX via track and mountain biking, including in disabled sports.
This expanded format will thus offer 13 disciplines next year in Glasgow, Scotland, and will increase to 19 disciplines in 2027 during the World Championships which will take place from September 11 to 26 in Haute-Savoie where the Mountain Bike World Championships met with a large success this summer in Les Gets. “It is a great satisfaction for French cycling which will bring all the spotlight to our sport. My ambition is for it to appear at the same level as a Rugby World Cup or a Euro football match.”enthuses the president of the French Cycling Federation (FFC), Michel Callot.
A rugged course for road racing
The queen event, the road race, will take place on a route which will be the copy-paste of that of the 1980 Worlds won by Bernard Hinault, on a circuit taking the ascent of the mythical Côte de Domancy (2.7 km to more than 8% on average). Enough to crown a puncher of the caliber of the current world champion, Julian Alaphilippe, who will however find it difficult to play the leading roles, he who will then be 35 years old.
France will therefore once again be the scene of the World Cycling Championships, 27 years after those organized in 2000 in Plouay, Brittany, which crowned the obscure Latvian Romāns Vainšteins in the road race. The French and Dutch candidacies were decided by a vote of the UCI Management Committee which met on Tuesday and Wednesday and which also designated Montreal as the organizing city of the 2026 World Cycling Championships on the road, one after Rwanda and two years after Switzerland.
However, the French candidacy is not unanimous in Haute-Savoie where several appeals, the first of which was rejected by the Administrative Court of Grenoble, have been filed by a group of associations and elected environmentalists who castigate “a 20th century project”.