"The Tour Feeds On The Beauties Of France, We Don't Want To Damage France" — Prudhomme Rejects ASO Responsibility For 872-Tree Ballon d'Alsace Cull, Insists Vosges Safety Works Were Greenlit Two Years Before The 2026 Route Was Known
Saturday morning Issy-les-Moulineaux. Forty-eight hours after a regional environmental committee in the Vosges put the felling of 872 trees on the Ballon d'Alsace into the political conversation, Christian Prudhomme has gone on the record at ASO headquarters with the firmest denial the Tour de France director has issued in a controversy of this kind: the decision to cut the trees was taken in 2023, by the local Office National des Forêts and the Conseil Départemental, more than a year before ASO published the route the 2026 race will follow. "The Tour feeds on the beauties of France," Prudhomme said. "We don't want to damage France."
The controversy lit up earlier this week after a regional press piece carried by Cyclism'Actu framed the 872-tree count as a direct consequence of the Tour's decision to send the 2026 race up the Ballon d'Alsace on Stage 14 between Mulhouse and Le Markstein, the Saturday 18 July mountain stage that closes the first Vosges block. The piece quoted local environmental groups arguing the works were rushed through to accommodate the race convoy and to widen sight-lines for spectators on the closing ramps.
Prudhomme's counter at the Friday-evening ASO briefing was procedural and dated: the road closure for the works was published by the local préfecture on 12 March 2024, with the works themselves running from 15 April to 15 May 2026, and the underlying tree survey commissioned by the ONF dates to autumn 2022. ASO published the 2026 Tour de France route on 23 October 2025 — nineteen months after the road-closure notice and three years after the survey that catalogued the 872 trees as diseased or structurally compromised. "The chronology is what it is," Prudhomme said. "We did not ask for these trees to be cut. The local authorities decided. We will race past them."
The Tour director did acknowledge the broader pattern that has historically attached to the race's arrival in regional France: communes and departments use the announcement as a deadline to accelerate road, drainage and safety works that had been on a slower municipal timetable. "It is true that the Tour's arrival speeds up local infrastructure projects," Prudhomme said. "We understand that. We do not issue ultimatums. We do not require destruction. The Tour does not demand that any commune cuts a single tree to make the race possible. We adapt to what France has built, not the other way round."
The numbers behind the Vosges works are the figures the controversy will carry forward. 872 trees catalogued for felling, almost all on the south-eastern slope between the Col du Ballon d'Alsace summit at 1,178m and the village of Saint-Maurice-sur-Moselle at 552m; the road closure runs the full month between 15 April and 15 May, with the départemental D465 fully reopened on 16 May; the works are funded by the Conseil Départemental des Vosges with a co-financing line from the Région Grand Est, no ASO contribution flagged. The 2026 Stage 14 itself runs 155km from Mulhouse across the Ballon d'Alsace and onto Le Markstein, with 3,800m of vertical climbing across five categorised climbs.
The political read — raised at the Friday-evening briefing by an L'Équipe correspondent — is whether the controversy will force ASO to publish a more granular environmental-impact statement alongside future route announcements. Prudhomme did not commit to a date but indicated a working group on the topic has been running inside ASO for the past two seasons. "We work closely with every region we visit. We will continue to work closely. If there is a way to publish more, we will look at it. But we will not pretend a decision was ours when it was not."
The 2026 Tour de France rolls out from the Spanish Basque Country on 4 July and arrives in Paris on 26 July. The Vosges block will be the race's third mountain block after the Massif Central and the early Pyrénées, with Stage 14 to Le Markstein widely flagged as the day the GC will take its first decisive shape ahead of the Alpine block in week three. The Ballon d'Alsace itself is the second-category climb at 9.4km/6.6% — a long, regular grind through what will, after the works conclude, be a noticeably more open stretch of Vosges hillside.
Prudhomme's closing remark at the briefing — one that will probably define the press coverage through the weekend — circled back to the framing the Tour has used at every iteration of this kind of debate since the 2018 Mont Ventoux fire response: "The race exists because the country exists. We have a responsibility to the country, not the other way round." Whether that framing holds across the next ASO route announcement, due in October for the 2027 race, is the question the Vosges file has now opened.