2026 Tour de France route does Remco Evenepoel no favours

A year ago, when ASO unveiled a Tour de France route that featured Hautacam, Mont Ventoux and the Col de la Loze, it seemed the organiser was grappling at finding a way to Tadej Pogačar-proof their course by bringing him back to the sites of some of his biggest setbacks on the race.

Pogačar’s utter domination of the 2025 Tour showed the folly of even trying. This Javier Sola-trained iteration of Pogačar seemingly has no weaknesses. At the very least, he is no longer as vulnerable to high altitude and cumulative fatigue as he was when Jonas Vingegaard defeated him in 2022 and 2023.

Indeed, Pogačar’s mastery across all terrains these days means that you’d fancy him to win the Tour even if the route were composed of a series of criteriums. No matter what course was presented in Paris on Thursday, Pogačar would line up in Barcelona next July as the overwhelming favourite for overall victory.

As it turns out, technical director Thierry Gouvenou hasn’t cooked up any real surprises for the 2026 route. The fare is very much in keeping with the set menu the Tour has been serving up in recent years. There is an explosive opening weekend, a very early foray into the high mountains, plenty of medium mountains in week two, and then a series of increasingly demanding high-altitude stages in the latter part of the race, with Montmartre for dessert.

There will certainly be no complaints from Pogačar or Vingegaard about the 2026 Tour route, but the third man in their duel might feel rather differently. 

Remco Evenepoel’s move to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe was the soap opera of the summer, and the transfer is part of his ongoing endeavour to win the Tour. After placing an encouraging third on his debut in 2024, Evenepoel endured a setback last July, abandoning on the Tourmalet, but he remains the man most likely to challenge the longstanding Pogačar-Vingegaard duopoly.

With that in mind, it’s hard to shake off the impression that ASO have missed a trick here by not throwing Evenepoel a bone with the course design. He is still a rung or three behind Pogačar and Vingegaard in the high mountains, of course, but he is also, by a distance, the best time triallist in the world. 

If ASO wanted a simple way to shape the narrative a little differently in July, they could have placed a long early time trial on the route in the expectation that Evenepoel would claim yellow and then have to try to withstand offensives from Pogačar and Vingegaard.

Instead, Evenepoel will have previous few kilometres against the watch, and he will have to wait until the third week before he rolls down the ramp in an individual time trial. Based on Pogačar’s 2024 and 2025 performances, the Tour might already have been decided by then.

The 2026 Tour starts with a 19km team time trial that isn’t really a team time trial at all, but rather a high-speed lead-out to a solo effort up Montjuic. An on-form Evenepoel and a strong Red Bull should still fare well there, though both Pogačar and Vingegaard will both fancy their chances of at least breaking even.

An individual test, by contrast, would have given Evenepoel a chance to lay down an early marker similar to his ill-starred 2023 Giro d’Italia, when he put two seconds per kilometre into rival Primoz Roglic on the opening afternoon.

The details of the Barcelona opener were already public knowledge, of course, but Evenepoel and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe will surely have been dismayed as they watched the unveiling of the rest of the Tour course on Thursday.

The race tackles the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Vosges and the Jura before the lone individual time trial on stage 16, along the shores of Lake Geneva. The rolling 26km test to Thonon-les-Bains will suit Evenepoel, of course – more or less every time trial does – but coming two weeks into the Tour, fatigue will be a weighty factor, and it will surely limit Evenepoel’s expected gains against Pogačar and Vingegaard.

That is if Evenepoel even rides the Tour. There was a strikingly lukewarm response to the route from his new sports director Zak Dempster, who said that Red Bull would “wait and see” before deciding on what Grand Tour their new signing would ride. It’s easy to imagine RCS Sport scrambling to shoehorn a pair of enticingly long time trials into the Giro route.

Ultimately, mind, if Evenepoel wants to win the Tour at some point, then he is going to have to improve enough in the high mountains to do so. He cannot simply hope that in the future ASO suddenly revert to the Jean-Marie Leblanc school of course design and produce a Tour route with two 50km time trials and only a pair of summit finishes. 

In that light, Evenepoel and Red Bull might yet decide that taking on a 2026 Tour route that patently doesn’t suit him is still the best way of working towards the eventual goal of wearing yellow in Paris in the years ahead.

But at this remove, the 2026 Tour looks set to offer a repeat of a film we’ve already seen before, with Pogačar and Vingegaard squaring up for the sixth straight edition of an increasingly lopsided duel.