Mont Ventoux feels like the top of the world. Its dry, barren, dusty peak spans high into turquoise skies, broken only by the red pillar of the weather station that sits on its summit. A distinct absence of vegetation and jagged limestone slopes make it feel like a pathway to the supernatural, home to both much life and so little. The bald mountain looks out upon France’s Provence region from every angle, a guard of the vineyards and farms that sit beneath it. A watcher of the Tour de France peloton as it approaches.
The ethereal beauty of Ventoux is dangerously endearing – it is an alien in the landscape it inhabits. While this makes it a place of intrigue, there is also a fear in the unknown. When the Tour returned to the climb in 2025, this was the feeling among the riders who would face it. Ventoux offered a chance, however slim, for a rare breakaway victory, but the difficulty of its slopes also posed danger for the general classification riders. Would Tadej Pogačar dominate once more? Would he take a 22nd Tour stage win? Would he grasp Ventoux’s magic for himself, leaving nothing for the rest?
Bike racing fans lined the entirety of the fabled mountain waiting to find out. From the lowest slopes to the very summit, France came out to see who would be victim to Ventoux’s gradients and who would conquer them. There were families dressed in polka dots, there was cardboard painted with the names of hometown heroes, yellow caps made bursts of colour in the chalky, bleached stone. The caravan came through, then we heard the sounds of the helicopter and the sirens of the police motorbikes and those were the signs: the Tour was here, and soon we would have our answers.
If you stand close to the summit of Ventoux on the final hairpin, around 150 metres from the finish line, you can watch the race unfold on a big screen which is erected each year for the thousands who come out to watch. There is, of course, a delay between the real action on the road and the time it is broadcast live, so the riders come past and are just out of sight before you know exactly how things have ended up. On Tuesday, in stage 17 of the 2025 Tour de France, the first riders to reach this point and pass the hundreds who had stood in the baking sun for hours awaiting them were Ben Healy of EF Education-EasyPost and Valentin Paret-Peintre of Soudal Quick-Step.
The noise builds in a crescendo in those final few moments when they get closer, the excited chatter turns to shouts, then to cheers, then to a wall of sound that feels like it could make even the Ventoux itself quiver. Healy and Paret-Peintre were sprinting hard, mano a mano, fighting for a win here and what it means, fighting for the chance to be the man who would beat the mountain. The crowd, of course, were screaming for their home rider, 24-year-old Paret-Peintre, who is riding his first ever Tour de France. A slight climber, nicknamed breciola (the crumb) in Italy and usually a domestique for Remco Evenepoel, Paret-Peintre was never the outright favourite to win on a stage like this. But the mountain chooses who it chooses, and perhaps it knew something we didn't. It knows its people; the Frenchman climbs like he was born to do it, dancing on the pedals, at home when the gradient kicks up.
The sprinting duo passed the fans who were planted at the top and disappeared round the corner, racing the final metres to the line. As they went, yellow-capped heads turned back from the road to the giant screen. The noise went for a moment, but then, as Paret-Peintre edged his wheel in front, it came back again. Bare arms punched the skies, fans hugged, they whooped. For the first time this Tour, France had its stage win. Paret-Peintre became the fifth French rider to win at the summit of Mont Ventoux in the Tour de France after Raymond Poulidor in 1965. This is the magic of the mountain.
“Ben Healy was really strong in his attacks, but I was telling myself that it was a victory on Mont Ventoux. You can't give up, even in the last 100 meters to overtake him, I really struggled but I said to myself ‘you have to do it, you can't give up,’" the Paret-Peintre said at the finish line, his eyes glassy. “I really thought that Pogačar was going to want to win and that he was going to lock down the race. I didn’t really believe it.”
Paret-Peintre knew the gravity of his achievement: "It's a legendary place in cycling; so much has happened there. It also has an international reputation. In a Belgian team, when we ask which pass we know best in France, it's Mont Ventoux, the holidays when we were kids, the images on TV, everything. Ventoux has more influence than other passes."
Victory atop the most famous mountain in the sport, in the biggest bike race on the planet, in front of a crowd who yearned for his success, Paret-Peintre didn’t just feel like he was on top of the world as he crossed the finish line at the summit, he really was. In cycling terms, it doesn’t get any better than this.
And when the winner is decided, when the interviews are done, when the podium ceremonies are complete with cameras flashing, when the fans have packed away their picnics and trudged back down to Bédoin, when the team cars have left in a rainbow convoy, Ventoux will return to its watchful state. The sleeping giant that comes to life when the Tour visits, getting a splash of bright paint on its milky surface, will stand stoically until it is called into action once more. It will make and break dreams again. There is no stadium quite like it.
