We think of ourselves as untypical. What do you think?

• We are 5 friends of 20 years, sometimes a touch crazy.
• We are all 40 plus, some of us plus plus.
• We are sometimes sporty.
• We decided to ride a crazy project.

Support us: we shall attempt to ride the "Tour de France" in favor of "William Wates Memorial Trust"

We are 5 old friends Bertrand, Fred, Guillaume, Nicolas and Stéphane and we tend to complete together 1 bicycle trip each year. The itineraries vary and thus far have taken us throughout a different part of France each year..



This trip is an opportunity for us to discover our own country: we ride about 1000 km per trip (with stages of anywhere between 120 km for the most mountainous to 230 km for the craziest) ... Often, arrivals are staged purposely to meet other friends along the way. This is as much a sporting journey as a human and more and more often a culinary one.

Despite our group solidarity, we have had to suffer some 'losses" during the journey (see page regarding anonymous retirees). And we have had to accept a number of temporary quitters for various reasons, be it accidents or lack of training, seldom lack of mental strength...

        


This year, every one in the group will be over 40 at the time of our new challenge.
 
To help overcome this mid-life crisis, instead of buying the latest sports car or secretly going for a mistress, we decided to ride our bike and attempt to complete nothing less but the Tour De France.

The Tour de France just like the pros, but a week beforehand!

And we added to the huge sporting challenge another challenge which is at least equally daunting to us: raising charity money for our participation to the event.

The 2015 Version of Tour De France is:

a departure from Utrecht and the traditional arrival on the Champs Elysees in Paris

3344 km of (mostly) asphalt through the north of Brittany, the Pyrenees, the Alps,

21 stages including pavers, prologues, flat, wind, and of course the mountain climbs and passes.

Our Tour de France will take place from 27 June to 19 July 2015 and is managed by Tour de force.
As we are not professionals, the difficulty is necessarily more important because our weight does not always play in our favor (only downhill, we are somehow at an advantage):

Do not conclude too quickly from these graphs that the feat achieved by the pros is simpler than ours (although they do weigh 20 to 40 kg less than we do). They go much go faster than we do: in fact, we are guessing it will take us 10 hours to ride a stage done by the pros in 5. What one can thus conclude is that we are a touch crazy and our desire to complete The Tour will be as high as the one from the pros.

To top it all, this crazy challenge gives us all the additional opportunity to reflect on our physical, mental and financial fortunes and raise awareness and funds for the association William Wates Memorial which helps young people in disadvantaged situations not to sink into violence: www.wwmt.org.