Continental, the main partner of the famous Tour de France, prepared a series of video interviews for the cycling enthusiasts “On the road” to the this year’s annual race. The guest of the first interview was the director of the race Christian Prudhomme. The Frenchman and former sports journalist is the head of the Tour de France for the last 14 years. Less than two months before the most prestigious cycling event in the world, he talked about the magic of the Tour and the this year’s route and, of course, touched on the Slovenian champions Tadej Pogačar and Primož Roglič, who determined the last year’s outcome.

In the last year, we have looked back to the past and prepared a review of work and activities implemented as part of the Gripworld.

The document includes the most important activities of Continental in the Adriatic region in recent years. We selected the best practices, emphasized platforms that were the carriers of individual actions and key activities on individual events. It was beautiful and fun and sometimes very demanding. But noting beautiful comes easy.

Searching interesting stories and suitable collaborations is not always an easy task; however, it is crucial that we find the right partners to spread the message of the brand.

Check out the entire document HERE.

We firmly stand behind providing the best grip for you. In the car, on the bike or while running. This is why we believe in our products and, at the same time, spread awareness of sharing the road, while being careful of all the players involved and following the rules.

We hope that this collection of the most interesting activities represents our work in the previous period. We will try to make the next five years at least as active and successful as the past ones!

Continental!

#ShareTheRoad #GetTheGrip #GetYourGrip

Now that Tour de France is over, we have gathered some interesting facts and figures about this three-week long spectacle.

The organizers have prepared no less than 20 different images for the yellow jersey this year. The jersey of the leader of the general classification, worn by Primož Roglič (Jumbo Visma) for more than a half of this year’s edition of the race, might look the same from the distance every day, but it is not. The finish of each stage, that is the host town or municipality, contributed its own image, a silhouette, for the yellow jersey. Roglič therefore exchanged eleven different images on the leader’s jersey, while Pogačar only wore one: the one with the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile.

Foto: A.S.O. Thomas Maheux

Slovenia is only the 15th country with a win at le Tour. In the 117 years of history of the race, it was the hosts who collected the most wins (France has 36 wins), followed by Belgium (18), Spain (12) and Italy (10). Slovenia, along with Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Australia and Columbia, has one win.

The average speed at this year’s tour was 39.59 km/h. This is around one km/h slower than last year. The average speed at the previous five editions of the race is also slightly higher than this year’s (40.09 km/h).

Foto: A.S.O. Pauline Ballet

At this year’s edition of le Tour, the riders used around 45,000 water bottles, most of them collected as souvenirs by the spectators along the route.

On average, each rider has burnt 124,000 calories over the course of the three weeks, that is from 5,000 to 6,000 calories per stage. In food or beverage, this amounts to 200 bottles of champagne, 500 croissants or 155 full English breakfasts.

From the start in Nice to the finish in Paris, each rider made almost 500,000 pedal strokes. At the average 90 revolutions per minute, the final number is 490,000 pedal strokes.

Foto: A.S.O. Pauline Ballet

The peloton of this year’s edition of le Tour, with 176 riders at the start (and 146 crossing the finishing line) and 3,470 kilometres covered, has used 850 bicycle tyres in the three-week race. Beside six (cycling) teams which ride on Continental tyres, all the official vehicles of the tour are equipped with Continental tyres as well.

This year’s winner, Tadej Pogačar (Team UAE Emirates), received a cash prize of 623,930 € for his victory, including all stage, mountain and intermediate sprint wins. Most of the money will be distributed evenly to his teammates.

Around 1,800 journalists were issued press passes and the tour was broadcast on 100 TV stations all over the world. On average, 6.3 million French people watched the stage 15 with the climb on the Colombier, and as many as 40 million, that is almost two thirds of the inhabitants, have watched at least a part of a stage in this year’s edition of the race.

Foto: A.S.O. Pauline Ballet

In Slovenia, le Tour achieved the highest rating during the penultimate stage – the time-trial, when the finish and the competition between Tadej Pogačar and Primož Roglič took place. At 18h10, 17.5 percent or 332,400 spectators watched the race on TV Slovenia 2, which is more than 60 percent of all TV viewers. The final stage as a whole had the highest rating. On average, 11.5 percent or 218,900 spectators watched it, which is 41 percent of all TV viewers during that time slot.

The official website letour.fr recorded 14.5 million unique visitors during the three-week race, and the picture of Primož Roglič and Tadej Pogačar hugging at the end of the time-trial at stage 20, which was posted on the Tour’s official Instagram profile, collected more than a million likes.

At the door is a new, this time already the 107th edition of the most resounding and prestigious annual sporting event in the world. The Tour de France is not merely a cycling highlight of the year and not just a search for the best cyclist on French roads, it is a sporting highlight of the summer with the longest tradition and stories that can be written only by the drama of endless miles, ups, downs, falls, affairs, tears of happiness and sadness, each time most often expressed at the finish line on the famous granite blocks of the Champs-Élysées in the centre of Paris.

The Tour is a trademark of France, the most touristy country in the world, similar to the Eiffel Tower, cheese, champagne, Napoleon or Asterix. The Tour is also, more than anything else, an exceptional mixture of passion, enthusiasm, the adrenaline of – both competitors and spectators. And of course, the most prestigious bicycle race in the world, which time and time again serves up amazing stories, records, anecdotes and scandals.

It has been like this since 1903, when the then journalist of the sports newspaper L’Auto (later L’Equipe) Geo Lefevre, with the support of his editor Henri Desgrange, gave the initiative for organizing the first cycling race, which had six long stages (the longest Nantes-Paris as much as 471 kilometres), and was won by the Frenchman Maurice Garin at an average speed of 25 kilometres per hour (today it is about 41 km/h). Garin also won a year later, but after a week the organizers took away his victory because he had travelled half of one of the stages by train. Yes, also affairs have always been an integral part of the Tour de France.

Last year’s winner, Egan Bernal, a Colombian, became the youngest in the Tour history to cross the finish line in the yellow jersey at the age of 22, but he is still not the youngest winner of the Tour de France. How is this possible? The famous yellow jersey was introduced on the Tour as late as 1919, mainly to make it easier for both the competitors and spectators to see the current best in the race, so that the youngest winner, the 19-year-old Frenchman Henri Cornet, was not yet in yellow in 1904. However, Cornet was also green and pale that year, as his rivals later admitted that they had added a sedative to his food during dinner at a roadside inn in the last two stages. But neither the sedative nor the tacks sprinkled on the road in the last stage (because the villagers were angry that the turmoil was on their local road), which caused him to drive the last 40 kilometres with punctured tires, prevented Cornet from winning 116 years ago.

Tour de France has served up countless anecdotes over the years, but has also most certainly developed professionally, and, in recent years, became one of the most attractive sporting events in the world in terms of media, economy and sponsorship. In the past, the riders had raced every man for himself, in the first years certainly without escorts, without service vehicles, without teams, only individually. Accordingly, there were also more either funny or tragic incidents.

Before the First World War, the riders have been known to smoke a few cigarettes before each stage, thinking that nicotine would help them in their uphill struggles, and they had also accepted help from roadside spectators on more than one occasion. The Algerian Abdel-Kader Zaaf was thus listed at the top of the anecdotes in 1950, he had built up a lead over his rivals of more than half an hour in the scorching heat, but had ran out of water and grabbed a bottle offered to him by a spectator alongside the road near Perpignan. He quickly took a few sips and found out too late that there was wine in the bottle. According to the eyewitnesses, he soon started zigzagging across the road, he then put down his bicycle, laid down in the shade of a nearby tree, and fell asleep. After 20 minutes, the spectators eventually woke him up, the confused Zaaf jumped on his bicycle and drove off – in the wrong direction. After a few kilometres, when the majority of riders were already very close, he became ill and ended up in a nearby medical centre and resigned. The Frenchman Napoleon Paoli also did not make it to the finish line in 1920, as he crashed into a donkey on a curve during his descent and broke his bicycle. Then he mounted the donkey and headed towards the finish line, but was disqualified for accepting unauthorised outside assistance.

Nowadays, of course, such anecdotes are nearly impossible, as the race is organized at the highest possible level, but scandals still accompany it throughout all its long years. In recent years, the most high-profile affair was most certainly the one of the serial winner, the American Lance Armstrong, who won seven times in a row between 1999 and 2005 but was later stripped of all his victories due to the proven use of banned performance-enhancing drugs.

This year’s Tour de France, which will start on 29 August on the Côte d’Azur and end on 20 September in Paris, will most certainly be different from all the past ones due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The competitors will be in some kind of a bubble the entire time, therefore, highly isolated from the outside world, regularly tested for Covid-19, and the Tour will end not before mid-September for the first time. In the caravan of 22 professional teams, there will be as many as five Slovenians, including officially the best in the world, Primož Roglič (Jumbo Visma), who is considered one of the favourites. Also participating will be Tadej Pogačar, Jan Polanc (both UAE Team Emirates), Matej Mohorič (Bahrain McLaren) and Luka Mezgec (Mitchelton Scott).

Continental, a long-time partner of the Tour de France, will supply as many as six teams this year with their tires, hand-made in the German city of Korbach. Continental will also supply all the race’s escort vehicles, and will once again be the official sponsor of the stage finish lines, as the winner of each of the 21 stages, shall be handed over a Continental trophy on the podium.

The current situation has unfortunately led to the cancellation of some of the Continental Trekking League events, but we firmly believe, that the spread of the COVID-19 virus will only be overcome if we strictly follow the new measures and stay at home. In the spirit of staying at home, we have conducted an online interview with the founder of the Trekking League, Mr. Šimun Cimerman. He has been bringing trekking fans together since 2003 and last year, after several years of cooperation with Continental, the company has been named the official Trekking League partner.

Šimun is a passionate runner and has been participated in a number of runs, such as the Eco Challenge Morocco 1998, Radi Gauloises Vietnam 2020, Desafio de Los Volcanes Ande and many more ultra-trail events. He has co-organized over 150 sports and tourism events spread over 4 countries and set in more than 40 different locations in the last 20 years.

There are 14 planned events in the 16th Trekking League season, which was renamed last year to the Continental Trekking League, two of which are partnered events.

Between March and November of this year, the 14 planned events will take place in four different countries. The majority are placed in Croatia, one is placed in each Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.

The Soča Trail will take place in the valley of the river Soča on July 4th, the Sutjeska Trail, a novelty this season, will take place in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the 1st of August. One of the two partnered events, Durmitor Vertical, is set to take place in Montenegro on the 8th of August. The season was initially set to begin last weekend, but the event on the island of Pašman was cancelled, due to the new regulations concerning preventing the spread of the Coronavirus. Thus the new season will begin on March 28th on the island of Pag with the legendary event “Life on Mars”.

All of the venues have new routes, which will definitely mean that even those, who have tried out on the previous routes will have a somewhat new experience this year,” stated Šimun Cimerman, the founder and organizer of the Trekking League, who is most proud of the fact that the number of women competing last year surpassed the number of men for the first time. “We should also mention that there were about 100 kids under the age of 14 competing at each event last year,” he added.

SCHEDULE | Continental Treking liga 2020:
👟 🚲 Event 🗓️ Date 📍 Venue
CANCELED | Škraping* March 7, 2020 Pašman (CRO)
POSTPONED | Continental Life on Mars** March 28, 2020 Pag (CRO)
Adria Spring Trail April 18, 2020 Njivice, Krk (CRO)
Zagorje Trekk May 9, 2020 Zagorje (CRO)
Brač SupeTrail May 23, 2020 Supetar, Brač (CRO)
Velebit Trail June 20, 2020 Velebit (CRO)
Soča Outdoor Festival July 4, 2020 Posočje (SLO)
Sutjeska Trail August 8, 2020 Sutjeska (BiH)
Zrmanja Trail September 5, 2020 Zrmanja (CRO)
Continental Life on Mars September 19, 2020 Pag (CRO)
Rab Trail October 3, 2020 Rab (CRO)
Krk Trail October 17, 2020 Krk (CRO)
Papuk Trail November 21, 2020 Papuk (CRO)
Partnered events 2020:
👟 🚲 Event 🗓️ Date 📍 Venue
B2B Trail April 25, 2020 Baška, Krk (CRO)
Durmitor vertical August 8, 2020 Durmitor, Žabljak (MNE)

* The event has been canceled due to coronavirus.
** The event has been postponed to September 19, 2020 due to coronavirus.

The Continental “Life on Mars” Trail took place last weekend (Saturday, March 30th, 2019), surpassing all expectations. The event attracted more than 1,200 participants, who competed in 4 categories, ranging in length from 7 to 25 km.

In the photo gallery below, take a look at how »Life on Mars« took place on a beautiful day on the island of Pag.


PHOTOS:

The premium tire manufacturer Continental has extended and upgraded its partnership with Croatia’s most exciting outdoor running series Treking liga. In 2019, it is known as Continental Treking liga and also has a new composite logo.

Treking liga was established in 2003 and has since attracted thousands of runners from not only Croatia, but also the region, to stunning locations. This year’s 15th season has 10 events all over Croatia and starts on island Pašman in March and ends in the national park Papuk in November. Among other things, the runners will exploring »Life on Mars« on Pag and »Winnetou land« in canyon of the river Zrmanja.

There are two further partner events, one of them being Slovenia’s Soča Outdoor Festival, where Continental is also one of the main partners. Just like in 2018, Continental will be most exposed on the events on islands Pag (30. 3.) and Rab (21. 9.), while all Treking liga participants and fans can also expect some exciting prize competitions.

Continental is involved with running through the partnership with adidas. Adidas’s best running shoes have soles from Continental’s rubber, giving them even better grip: research has shown that on wet it improves up to 30 percent. This cooperation is called »Get Your Grip« and aims to show the importance of having a safe contact with the surface – not only while driving your car, but also while having a great time running.

You can find more about Continental Treking liga and the events of the 2019 season on www.outdoor.hr.