Tour de France Week 3 route guide: TT, Alpe d'Huez, and Montmartre

The third and final week of the 2026 Tour kicks off with a rolling 26km individual time trial that hits the Côte de Larringes early on. Important differences can be made in the GC battle on a day like this and world and Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) will be among those looking to capitalise on terrain which suits him best. 

Stage 17 is a deceptively hard 175km transition day; despite packing 2,000 meters of climbing, it serves as arguably the final opportunity for the sprinters, though there are no guarantees of a bunch sprint this deep into a Grand Tour. It could be an important day in the battle for the green jersey, where Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) currently leads Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Premier Tech).

After Thursday’s mountain stage, which finishes at Orcières Merlette, the race heads into its decisive finale with a brutal Alpine double header. It begins with the explosive 128km Stage 19, taking the riders over the Col Bayard and Col du Noyer before a breathless finish on the iconic 21 hairpins of Alpe d’Huez, where Tadej Pogačar of UAE Team Emirates XRG will look to extend his lead over Jonas Vingegaard of Visma | Lease a Bike.

This is immediately followed by Stage 20, the monster queen stage scaling 5,600 vertical meters across the Croix de Fer, Télégraphe, Galibier, and the Col de Sarenne, an alternative road up Alpe d'Huez. 

Finally, the Tour concludes with stage 21 in Paris with the returning, bud adjusted, Montmartre circuit. The riders will tackle three ascents of the climb, and as we saw last year, it could become a selective finale.

The days of the Tour featuring two long time trials are long since gone, and the rouleurs have especially meagre pickings in 2026. The race’s lone individual time trial is just 26km in length and it comes at the beginning of the third week, by which point residual fatigue can often count for as much as pure ability against the watch.

Still, Jonas Vingegaard put daylight into Tadej Pogacar on the corresponding stage in 2023, and Remco Evenepoel will see this test along the shore of Lake Geneva as a key moment in his Tour challenge. 

It’s not a pure rouleur’s course, mind, with the road climbing steadily for the first 9km to the Côte de Larringes (9.4km at 4.3%). A short descent follows but a flat run into Thonen-les-Baines. Evenepoel, the ‘Aero Bullet,’ will be favourite for stage honours, but it’s not immediately clear what kind of gaps will open among the podium contenders here.

With more than 2,000m of climbing on the menu, stage 17 is only notionally ‘flat’ – but with the Alps to come and with Montmartre still in place on the final day in Paris, this looks a lot like the last dance for the sprinters on the 2026 Tour.

They won’t have it all their own way, mind, and much will depend on how many fast men are left with something to fight for come the third week of the Tour. There will certainly be no shortage of willing attackers, with the Col des Prés and Col de Couz featuring in the opening half of the stage.

There is some rolling terrain in the finale, too, including a shallow 2.5km climb just before the finish in Voiron. That might burn off some of the fast men, but a bunch finish of some description still seems likely.

Orcières-Merlette will forever be synonymous with the Tour’s greatest unfinished symphony. Luis Ocaña took yellow there after putting the hitherto unbeatable Eddy Merckx to the sword with a mesmerising solo display in 1971, but the Spaniard would crash out of the race on the descent of the Col de Menté in the Pyrenees.

The burning question in 2026 is whether anybody can do unto Pogacar what Ocaña did unto Merckx, though this year’s run to Orcières-Merlette might not offer the right platform. It’s a gentler run to the final climb than in 1971, when Ocaña used the Col du Noyer as a springboard.

The climbs of Engins (11.4km at 5.4%) and Monteynard (9.7km at 5%) are straightforward by comparison, though the road then climbs steadily towards the foot of the final ascent to Orcières-Merlette (7.1km at 6.7%).

On the Tour’s last visit in 2020, Primoz Roglic sprinted to victory from a sizeable group, but that came on stage 4 and in a season interrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown. The peloton won’t be as fresh here, and so this should be a more selective kind of day.

This backloaded Tour ventures further into the Alps on stage 19 for the first part of a striking doubleheader. The short distance and the early climbs could make for a ferocious start, while the famous 21 hairpins of Alpe d’Huez will make for a breathless finale.

The tired legs in the peloton will curse the placement of the Col Bayard (5.5km at 6.8%) right from the start, and that’s followed by the Col du Noyer (7.3km at 8.2%). If the yellow jersey’s team are showing signs of flagging by this point, expect their rivals to do some early probing in the hope of isolating the race leader.

There’s a chance to regroup in the middle portion of the stage, mind, with the Col d’Ornon (5.6km at 6.2%) serving as a prologue to the indelible ascent of Alpe d’Huez (13.9km at 8%). Navigating the ocean of humanity on the climb is never easy at the best of times. With the Tour potentially still on the line, this could produce one the most dramatic finales ever seen on the Alpe.

Also read: Tour de France: The five most dramatic Alpe d'Huez stages

In an echo of the modern Giro d’Italia, the 2026 Tour has saved its hardest days for last, and no stage is more demanding than this mammoth Alpine leg, which features some 5,600m of climbing. ASO’s great hope is that the race will still be undecided by this point; at the very least, the sheer difficulty of this stage means that a late Hail Mary offensive might just pay off.

The stage is brutal in its simplicity and in its demands, with four mountain passes crammed into its 172km: the road either goes up or down all day. 

The winnowing process begins with the interminable Col de la Croix de Fer (24km at 5.2%) and it continues with the Col du Télégraphe (12km at 7.1%), which segues immediately into the mighty Col du Galibier (17km at 6.8%). At 2,631m, it’s the highest point of the Tour, but the riders won’t be able to see Paris just yet.

There’s still the minor matter of the Col de Sarenne (12.9km at 7.3%), which is the alternative road up to Alpe d’Huez. The Tour descended this road during the novel dual ascent of the Alpe in 2013, but this is a completely new test for the peloton. The summit comes with 15km to go, and the course then loops around to take in the final part of the classic Alpe ascent (3.8km at 6.1%). This is, by some distance, the crowning stage of the 2026 Tour.

The addition of the climb of Montmartre last July didn’t prevent the Paris finale from being a procession – Pogacar had long since wrapped up the yellow jersey and heavy rain saw the final 50km neutralised for GC – but it still produced a breathless hour or so of racing, with Wout van Aert eventually winning out over the Slovenian.

Not surprisingly, the Tour organisation has opted to retain Montmartre for 2026, but they have tweaked the configuration of the stage to give the sprinters’ a notional chance of contesting the win on the Champs-Élysées.

As in 2025, the riders will take on three ascents of the Butte Montmartre, but when they pass Sacré-Cœur for the final time, they will still have more than 10km and one lap of the traditional Champs-Élysées circuit to go. "The strongest sprinters will still have a chance," Christian Prudhomme insisted.