VIDEO. It repeats the 20 final stages of the Tour de France in one month.

Every two days, Bettina races along the Champs-Elysees at full speed. “Now I know this avenue by heart,” she says, weaving between Vélib bikes and electric scooters on the bike path.

This 35-year-old German cyclist achieves a real sporting feat: having completed all the final stages of the Tour de France over the past twenty years. Each time the route is different, but the finish is always in front of the Arc de Triomphe, as is customary at the end of each Grande lap. In just over five weeks.

On the day of filming, Bettina repeated the final stage of the 2008 Tour. The start took place in Etampes, in the south of Ile-de-France. Today Bettina’s team walks the route twice: out, then back. Double rations, raising the counter to 195 kilometers, and this is not nothing.

Team consisting of foreigners

“The idea came to me during labor,” says Bettina, pedaling. She has since copied all the routes from cyclists’ favorite app Strava to organize her own Tour de France in Paris.

At each stage she is joined by other amateur cyclists. Many of them come from his Parisian expat triathlon club. In this remake of the 2008 final stage, the team is very international: “We have French, Colombians, Germans,” describes the cyclist.

After an hour of running at high speed, the group reaches a forest road. Here Orlando asks everyone to stop, his wheel has just come off. Bettina takes out a stopwatch, the task is to fix it as quickly as possible.

This short forced break also provides an opportunity to look online to see who won the 2008 Tour de France. “This is the Spaniard Carlos Sastre,” Philip said to the rest of the group.

“She is determined and motivating.”

This year, Bettina decided to change her career in order to devote herself entirely to her passion for sports. After working as a consultant and project manager for about ten years, she became a triathlon coach. Today she leads a group of men and sometimes gives her advice.

“She is full of determination and motivation,” sums up Maxim, one of her teammates on stage. “She has a sense of sharing,” Camilla adds.

VIDEO. It repeats the 20 final stages of the Tour de France in one month.

Target the women’s Tour de France in August

With her women’s cycling club “Let’s Give Them to the Bike”, Bettina will soon take on a new challenge: riding the real Tour de France 2020, a month ahead of the men. “This initiative is called D-1, we usually take steps a day before the men,” says Bettina. “But this year, due to the postponement of the Tour, we are going to do it a month earlier.”

It is also a way to demand the creation of an official women’s Tour de France. And the idea is gaining momentum. Christian Prudhomme, head of the Amaury Sports Organization (ASO), announced in May that organizing a women’s Tour de France has not been ruled out in 2022.

Watch other episodes of the series “Biklu”