As I spend the early part of the summer talking about the Tour de France with normal people (read: non-cycling fans), there's one thing that catches almost everyone off-guard. I will outline the route and they'll say something like "What do you mean it starts in Barcelona?," as they adopt an expression that I imagine conveys a skepticism about whether I know Barcelona is not in France or that Louis XIV evacuated Catalonia following 1697's Peace of Ryswick. To those who haven't paid the closest attention, learning that "Tour" is subjective and "de France" is not entirely accurate is a useful entrypoint into learning about the joyful quirks of the world's biggest bike race. It will dawn on them that the route changes every year; as it turns out, figuring out why the organizers craft different races year after year will teach you a ton about the sport.
It wasn't always like this. Riders in the Tour's earliest days circumscribed a hexagon within the edges of France's borders, beginning and ending in Paris. The Tour is still known as the Grand Boucle, or Big Loop, an appellation that used to be literal. Most of the early Tours were raced clockwise, and went the other way for the first time in 1913, a decade after the first Tour. Innovations were sparse and slow, and though the route was tweaked every year, its shape and rhythm was mostly the same. It wasn't until 1960 that organizers had a stage start in a different city than where the previous one ended, with riders taking the train south from Bordeaux to Mont de Marsan. From that point, the Loop began slowly distending, its shape becoming increasingly abstract.
That familiar pattern held until the very recent past. There was a brief window of time when the Tour was by far the least interesting of the three Grand Tours. As if out of a stodgy commitment to traditionalism, the Tour stuck to a comfortable rhythm: a series of flat stages for the sprinters at the start of the race, two time trials through various fields, and visits to the Alps and Pyrenees, with regular summit finishes and familiar ascents in familiar arrangements. The delineations between climbing stage and sprint stage were meant to stay clean. Meanwhile, the Giro d'Italia was engineering quite interesting racing with mixed hilly stages, while the Vuelta a España was experimenting with exactly how much climbing it could get away with. Those races never attracted fields as strong as the Tour got, but the racing was often better, especially during the early reign of Team Sky.
But over the past 20 years, the routes have been getting far more interesting, and are changing more every year; since former pro Thierry Gouvenou took over in 2014, the Tour has modernized. Grand Départs in foreign countries are now the norm, with the rumored Slovenia start in a few years the Tour's most ambitious. Following a few experiments with gravel, cobbles, and 2018's ill-fated F1-style grid start on a ludicrously short 65-kilometer mountain stage, Gouvenou has been crafting masterpieces. He is committed foremost to variety. Some of his signature flourishes include backloaded routes; visits to France's lesser-known mountain ranges, breaking up the traditional Alps-Pyrenees rhythm; and choppier hilly stages that are almost impossible to predict ahead of time. He says he wants to visit every region of France at least every five years. Many will wonder why Lyon is never involved in the Tour, and I've heard that local officials consider not paying the fees to get involved a point of pride.
The story of how Gouvenou designs his routes is itself a subject of much French intrigue. Every autumn, he commits to a hilarious level of tradecraft to keep his work secret from the many people who want to learn the route ahead of its October announcement. Sleuths will cobble together rumors from tiny regional French papers, call hotels in small towns in the mountains to try and suss out whether someone has booked a huge block of rooms in July, and they'll even track which color the Škoda Gouvenou cycling team is driving in a given year, all to figure out the broad shape of the route he's putting together.
All of this only answers the question of how the route is different every year. The far more interesting question is why.
The Tour de France route is designed to wrongfoot its participants, responding to the ways its best riders in particular like to win. If you win on one type of route, the organizers will do their best to prevent you from winning an identical race the next year. There's a heartening commitment to theatricality here, and to the idea that being a yellow jersey–winning bike racer means having to perform on a variety of terrains and across different mountain ranges—in other words, to win in as many ways as possible.
In switching the routes up every year to challenge the greatest champions, the Tour shows an adversarial sort of reverence: What a compliment it is to have the organizers dedicated to a race structure in which the yellow jersey is harder to defend than it is to win. There's also a deep respect for history here. Each successive Tour win should be more demanding, the pressure of being a champion compounded by hostile roads rising up to fight you.
During the late reign of Team Sky, Gouvenou did all he could to neutralize the team's crushing strengths, often reducing time-trial kilometers, introducing shorter mountain stages that were harder to control, and generally going for maximally unpredictable stages. Now that Tadej Pogacar is lording over the peloton, Gouvenou's job is a lot harder. The 2025 and 2026 Tours represent different approaches to the same problem: defanging the most dangerous rider in the world.
How do you do something like that? By delaying Pogacar's ability to bite. Last year, the Tour began on the unforgiving, windy roads of Northern France, in hopes of either incentivizing rival teams to split the field and engage in echelon racing or by simply making UAE's task of controlling the race harder, so Pogacar's team would burn resources early on in the race. The tactic was a partial success, and though Pogacar went on to dominate the race, there was legitimate jeopardy after the second rest day when he crashed on the run-in to Toulouse.
This year, Gouvenou iterated on last year's strategy (and we'll have a full route preview coming later this week). There isn't an inarguably decisive stage on the cards until Stage 14, which means that Pogacar should at least be unable to run away with the race in the first two weeks. The entire run across the Pyrenees is oddly forgiving, with even the classic Aspin-Tourmalet stage finishing on the gentle, ramp-like slopes of the Gavarnie-Gèdre.
This is not to say the race will be boring, flat stages aside, of course. Gouvenou is cooking. Some of these early stages are fascinatingly choppy, like Stage 2's Catalan ode to last year's amazing Paris finale, Stage 10's deceptively difficult Massif Central day, and Stage 13's bizarro, double-climb finish 30 km from the line, almost begging Pogacar to fall into a trap and burn himself out going solo.
Pogacar, of course, doesn't do that, though there's no saying he won't this time around. That's the other beauty of the route: It may be designed to try and produce a certain type of race, but it's up to the riders to bring it to life.
