2025-07-23
Tour de France 2025: France Télévisions on the host Broadcast for This Year’s Gruelling Road Race Through the French Countryside
France Télévisions’ production manager for the Tour de France, Deborah Larrieu, is nearing the end of this year’s gruelling edition of what is the most high profile, annual road cycling race globally. SVG Europe caught up with her when she had a short break from the live action to find out a little bit more about France Télévisions’ history, goals and challenges for the Tour de France 2025.How long has it taken you to plan for the Tour? The logistics must be quite complex. What has been your process to get to the starting line?It takes all year, which means we start working on next year’s Tour even during the current race. It intensifies at the end of October when we know the route. We start the site surveys and study particularities of the stages (for some of them the TV compounds are split in two or even three parts.)With the director, we study the camera plans of each finish line. We also start doing research for the scenery – castles, etc – and start thinking of the helicopters’ flight strategy.How long have you been the host broadcaster for the Tour de France?France Télévisions (or, say, the state-owned TV broadcaster) has always been the host broadcaster for the Tour de France, that is as far back as 1948. The production has obviously evolved an awful lot over that time.How have you pushed your production of the Tour from 2024 to 2025, editorially and technically?We have tried to take advantage of a few technical improvements to save money, such as 5G instead of RF at the finish line, and both post production and archive management done from our headquarters instead of onsite.This year we have also included more stings – shootings of interesting sites with drones – which we think is of interest to all broadcasters since the Tour de France is not only about cycling [b
