Géraldine Polès reinvents Tour de France trophy at Sèvres Manufactory

For the 113th edition of the Tour de France, the President of the Republic and the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres commissioned artist Géraldine Polès to create a new decoration for the trophy, replacing the Omnisports Cup designed by Roger Vieillard that had been awarded since 1975. Polès, a visual artist based in Nantes and a 2017 graduate of the Beaux-Arts, was given carte blanche to redesign the iconic object. She created two versions of the trophy—a greenish-blue for the men's Tour and a sky-blue for the women's Tour—using the Diane cup model designed by James Guittet in the 1970s but never decorated before. The decoration, conceived as "a landscape to travel through," spirals around the porcelain with blue, green, and violet drapes, gold filaments, bicycle spokes, and fragments of topographical maps, evoking cycling without literal representation. Inside the bowl, winged stars and olive branches reference Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and an embrace replaces the traditional solitary champion image. Polès worked in residence at Sèvres for several months, collaborating with artisans on paper maquettes, forms, and the application of colors and 24-carat gold, including the rare burnishing technique. The trophies will be awarded on July 26 for the men's race and August 9 for the women's race.