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.
According to reports, collected by the website Velowire, fans can look forward to the return of some of the Tour’s most iconic climbs, including Alpe d’Huez and the Planche des Belles Filles, while the women’s race may be set for its first visit to Mont Ventoux.
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.
From there, the Tour could witness another first on day six with a stage to Gavarnie. According to Sud Ouest, this stage would leave Pau and finish on the gradual climb at the Cirque de Gavarnie UNESCO World Heritage site.
On stage 10, scheduled on 14 July, France’s Bastille Day, La Montagne are billing a yellow jersey rematch at Le Lioran, the climb on which Jonas Vingegaard outsprinted Tadej Pogačar to win a stage in 2024. The race is then expected to bear north east, with a finish on La Planche des Belles Filles on day 14, according to L’Ést Républicain.
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.
It would mark the 33rd time the climb’s weaving hairpins feature in the Tour route, the last being in 2022 when Tom Pidcock won solo. Alpe d’Huez also hosted the finale of the Tour de France Femmes in 2024, the edition won by Kasia Niewiadoma by four seconds – the smallest winning margin in the history of both the men’s and women’s races.
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.
As for the Tour de France Femmes, which will follow the men’s Tour next August, there’s talk of an ascent of Mont Ventoux, again per Le Dauphiné Libéré. ASO have made a point of including at least one marquee climb since the event's reboot in 2022, with the Planche des Belles Filles, the Col du Tourmalet, Alpe d’Huez and the Col de la Madeleine all ticked off.
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.
As with all rumours, there is currently no official promise of any of these climbs featuring in the 2026 men's or women's Tours. Cycling Weekly will provide extensive coverage of the confirmed routes when they are announced on 23 October.
