As the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl sang in ‘All My Life’, it’s done, done and on to the next one with cycling’s biggest race. No sooner has the dust settled on the 2025 Tour de France, that focus turns to the 2026 edition, and the rumour mill surrounding the route has been churning for months.
Officially, the full parcours of next year’s Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will be unveiled next Thursday 23 October, in a ceremony inside Paris’s Palais des Congrès. But we needn’t wait until then for an indication of what it might entail.
So far, we know three concrete facts about the 2026 Tour de France: it is scheduled to start in Barcelona with a team time trial on 4 July; stage two will go from Tarragona to Barcelona; and the final stage will conclude on Paris’s Champs-Élysées.
The race could enter the mountains as early as stage three, ICI Occitanie suggests, with a summit finish at the Pyrenean ski station of Les Angles. “It’s 99% sure,” a local elected official is reported to have said. It would mark the 1,800m-tall climb’s first inclusion in the Tour route, having previously featured in the 2022 Route d’Occitanie.
Pogačar has won on each of the Tour’s last two visits to the Planche: in 2020, he dramatically overturned Primož Roglič in a penultimate day time trial to earn his first of four yellow jerseys; he then won again two years later, when the stage finished at the climb’s ‘Super Planche’ extension, which crosses a gravel track and kicks up to 24%.
The route rumours then point to back-to-back high-mountain showdowns in the Alps. First reported by Le Dauphiné Libéré in July, the mythic Alpe d’Huez is set to return in the final week following a three-year hiatus.
Alongside Alpe d’Huez, Le Dauphiné Libéré are also forecasting a final-week mountaintop finish at Orcières-Merlette, the category-one, 1,850m-high summit, where Roglič won stage four in 2020.
The Giant of Provence has featured in the men’s Tour three times in the last 10 years – in 2025, 2021 and 2016 – but according to Pro Cycling Stats has only twice hosted a professional women’s race: the 2022 Mont Ventoux Dénivelé Challenge, won by Marta Cavalli, and a stage of the 2016 Tour Cycliste Féminin International de l’Ardèche.
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