(Paris) Alpe d’Huez, the legendary climb of the Tour de France, will host two stage finishes in 2026, including the terribly difficult one placed on the eve of the terminus in Paris where the Montmartre hill will once again be on the program on July 26.
Each presentation of the Grande Boucle has its “wow effect” and on Thursday we had to wait until the last moments at the Palais des Congrès in Paris to discover the highlight of the show of the 113e edition which will start on July 4 from Barcelona.
In 2026, Alpe d’Huez, the famous Dutch mountain which transforms into an open-air discotheque as runners pass by, will be on the menu two days in a row during the 19e and 20e steps.
The first Friday from Gap will end with the classic climb of the 21 venomous bends. The next day, the peloton will pass through the Col de Sarenne, a first in the Tour, to reach the Isère resort (the last four kilometers will be the same) at the end of an insane queen stage (5,600 m of positive altitude difference) also taking the Croix-de-Fer and the Galibier.
“I really wanted us to arrive via the Col de Sarenne, but we said to ourselves that we couldn’t go to Alpe d’Huez without going through the 21 bends. People wouldn’t understand it. The only way was to do it twice,” explains Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, to AFP.
Spectacular, the project is however not completely new since there had already been two arrivals two days in a row at Alpe d’Huez in 1979. At the time it was a decision taken at the last minute when the Vars resort had withdrawn, no longer having the means to accommodate the runners and the caravan.
Suspense
The Portuguese Joaquim Agostinho, who would die a few days later in a fall during a short race in Portugal, won the first, and the Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk the second, without managing to deprive Bernard Hinault of his second Tour de France.
“In 1979, the organizers withdrew to the Alpe. This time, it is completely intentional and it falls 40 years after the victory of Bernard Hinault hand in hand with Greg LeMond”, insists Prudhomme who hopes to maintain the suspense until the end with this “penultimate XXL stage”.
This is also the meaning of the general architecture of the 2026 edition, designed to prevent Tadej Pogacar, vying for a fifth victory, from losing the match too quickly.
After the first two and a half days in Spain and a team time trial during the first stage in Barcelona, the peloton will be entitled to a “softened” crossing of the Pyrenees. The three stages, including the unique one arriving in the magnificent Gavarnie cirque via the Tourmalet, are designed more for mountain adventurers than for pure climbers.
The route will then join Bordeaux before starting a long diagonal towards the east, passing through the Massif Central for a highly anticipated mountain stage in Lioran on July 14, and the Jura.
Montmartre, “obvious”
In the Vosges, the Markstein, which we will reach via the new and just asphalted Haag pass, will offer another stage for climbers, just like the one arriving at the splendid Solaison plateau, in Haute-Savoie, on Sunday July 19.
The emphasis placed on the intermediate massifs and its very steep slopes, if not as long as the passes of the Alps, is an assumed desire of the organizers to create a spectacle.
The 26-kilometer time trial between Évian-les-Bains and Thonon-les-Bains, the day after the second rest day, should not upset the general classification.
“The goal is to go from strength to strength and keep the largest possible panel of runners in the game,” underlines Prudhomme, citing facilitators like Ben Healy or Kevin Vauquelin.
The stages are often short and the accumulation of climbs reasonable.
There will still be nearly 55,000 meters of elevation gain in total, “in the high range”, but “it’s a mountain that was only pushed to the extreme at the end”, with three arrivals at the summit in the last four days, summarizes the Tour director.
In Paris, the triple passage as in 2025 by the Montmartre hill sounded like “obviousness” for the boss of the Grande Boucle, reinforced both by the spectacle offered and “our best audience peak in the last 25 years” with more than 9 million viewers.
It remains to keep the promise of more suspense. Because as the French climber Valentin Paret-Peintre says: “whether the Tour is hard or less hard will perhaps change the minutes with which he will win the Tour. But Pogacar remains the big favorite in all cases. »
The stages of the Tour de France 2026
- July 4: 1D Barcelona – Barcelona stage (team time trial), 19 km
- July 5: 2e stage Tarragona – Barcelona, 182 km
- July 6: 3e stage Granollers – Les Angles (France), 196 km
- July 7: 4e stage Carcassonne – Foix, 182 km
- July 8:5e Lannemezan – Pau stage, 158 km
- July 9: 6e Pau – Gavarnie-Gèdre stage, 186 km
- July 10: 7e Hagetmau – Bordeaux stage, 175 km
- July 11: 8e Périgueux-Bergerac stage, 182 km
- July 12: 9e Malemort – Ussel stage, 185 km
- July 13: day of rest in Cantal
- July 14: 10e Aurillac – Le Lioran stage, 167 km
- July 15: 11e Vichy-Nevers stage, 161 km
- July 16: 12e stage Circuit Nevers Magny-Cours – Chalon-sur-Saône, 181 km
- July 17: 13e Dole – Belfort stage, 205 km
- July 18: 14e stage Mulhouse – Le Markstein, 155 km
- July 19: 15e stage Champagnole – Plateau de Solaison, 184 km
- July 20: day of rest in Haute-Savoie
- July 21: 16e Évian-les-Bains – Thonon-les-Bains stage (individual time trial), 26 km
- July 22:17e Chambéry – Voiron stage, 175 km
- July 23: 18e Voiron – Orcières-Merlette stage, 185 km
- July 24: 19e Gap – Alpe d’Huez stage, 128 km
- July 25: 20e Bourg d’Oisans – Alpe d’Huez stage, 171 km
- July 26: 21e stage Thoiry – Paris Champs-Élysées, 130 km
