The 2010 Tour de France will start in Rotterdam with a 9 km time-trial course, the competition's organisers announced today.
It is the fifth time Holland will be the starting point for cycling's most prestigious race and Tour director Christian Prudhomme hopes it will be as successful as last year when London staged the Grand Depart.
'The choice of Rotterdam, a vast urban centre with one million two hundred thousand inhabitants, is directly in keeping with the special start of the Tour in London in 2007,' he said in a statement on the Tour's official website, www.letour.fr.
'The proposed project - "Rotterdam and the Tour, a new energy" - seduced us.
'It fits into an overall policy that aims to an even bigger place for the bicycle in the city's heart, while leaning on the popularity of the biggest cycling race in the world, the Tour de France.
'From the banks of the Thames to the biggest port in Europe: the same desire, the same will.
'A huge party is already being prepared with all the Dutch people...at the beginning of July 2010, it will be the enthusiasm and the jubilation of the people because of the Tour that will blow us away.'
Amsterdam was the stage the first time the Grand Depart took place outside Europe, in 1954, and Holland was to host the start three more times with the last occasion being in 1996.
The race has never set off in Rotterdam before, although it was the finishing line for the first stage in 1973, when the riders started in Scheveningen.
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