2026 Tour de France team time trial explained: Stage 1 format and rules

The Tour de France starts with a team time trial this year for the first time since 1971, but the format is different to any other collective effort in the race’s history. The 19km test on stage 1 in Barcelona will be a team time trial with a twist, with times taken individually at the finish atop Montjuïc.

Traditionally, teams have been awarded the time of the fourth (or fifth) rider across the finish line, while any riders dropped by their teammates were timed individually for the purposes of the general classification. That was the case on the last Tour team time trial in 2019, for instance, when Jumbo-Visma won in Brussels on stage 2 to keep Mike Teunissen in the yellow jersey.

On the opening day of the 2026 Tour, by contrast, each team will set out together, but each rider will be timed individually at the finish. Rather than tailor their effort to ensure that at least four riders come home together, teams will essentially provide a high-speed lead-out to put their leaders in the best possible position to gain time on their rivals on the short, sharp final climb up Montjuïc.

It will make for a very different kind of challenge to a traditional team time trial where, according to Chris Boardman’s maxim, a squad was only ever as strong as its weakest rider. In other words, having the best time triallist in the world in your line-up could only carry a team so far; he still needed at least three (or four, depending on the era) riders to stay with him all the way to the finish.

That general principle might still hold for the opening phase of this reconfigured team time trial, where there will be an obvious benefit to keeping as many riders as possible together to swap turns – but it will go out the window in the finale, where the strongest riders will no longer have to temper their efforts and wait for any straggling teammates.

This novel format has already been trialled three times by ASO at Paris-Nice, with Visma | Lease a Bike victorious on two occasions. In Dampierre-en-Burly in 2023, they finished with three riders together, though a fourth – Tobias Foss – was only four seconds further back, meaning that there was little material difference to a traditional team time trial. That was also the case in 2024, when winners UAE Team Emirates had four riders together at the finish in Auxerre.  

In Nevers in 2025, on the other hand, Jonas Vingegaard and Matteo Jorgenson came home together to win the stage for Visma, while the remainder of the squad finished half a minute and more behind.

Given the terrain and the stakes, that kind of scenario is likely to be reproduced in Barcelona on stage 1 of the 2026 Tour. It’s certainly what ASO envisaged when they first introduced this format in 2023, when they predicted team leaders finishing alone in the manner of the anchor leg of a team sprint effort on the track.

“This should force each team to adopt the best strategy to lead out their leader in the final stretch, which is not unlike team sprint events on the track,” ASO explained then. “The innovation should also stop a whole team sweeping the top GC standings.”

The potentially distorting effect of team time trials on the general classification has long been a concern for the Tour organisers, and the days of 70km team trials of the kind seen in the 1990s and 2000s are long gone.

In 2004, meanwhile, after years of GC contenders losing multiple minutes in team time trials in the opening week, ASO introduced a drastic change to the rules expressly to limit the amount of time that could be conceded.

The teams’ real times no longer counted towards the general classification. Instead, a bonus system was devised, with teams awarded a fixed time on GC based on their finishing position on the stage – ie. the team that finished second could only lose a maximum of 20 seconds on GC to the stage winner, while the final-placed team’s losses would be capped at three minutes.

While Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service squad beat Phonak by 1:07 on the day, his gain on GC was limited to 20 seconds over Tyler Hamilton. “It is a system which could have been devised only by the same bean-counting minds that invented France’s labyrinthine employment laws,” grumbled the Guardian afterwards.

The unloved system was repeated in 2005, but from there, the team time trial’s place in the Tour became rather less fixed. When it returned in 2009, the old timing method was brought back, but, tellingly, the distance was cut to 39km. The team time trial has featured just five times since, in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2018 and 2019, never with a distance greater than 35km.

The discipline makes its return to the Tour in Barcelona on July 4, though the combination of the relatively short distance – 19km – and the novel format essentially continues ASO’s trend of trying to limit the impact of a collective effort on the individual general classification. No matter, it should make for a dramatic opening chapter to the 2026 Tour, given that the route lends itself perfectly to the new format.

Stage 1 of the Tour can be broken into two distinct parts. The first 15km or so take place on broadly flat roads or on false flats, but the terrain becomes altogether more demanding in the finale, with the course taking in the Côte de Montjuïc (1.1km at 5.1%), which is followed shortly afterwards by the climb to the finish line at the Olympic Stadium, which also drags upwards for 1.1km at 5.1%.

The broad goal for teams looks self-evident at this remove – namely they will look to shield their GC leaders in the opening kilometres and bring them as quickly as possible to the finale, before swinging off and allowing them to cut loose on the two climbs.

Even so, each eight-man squad will have to figure out their strategy carefully and make compromises in how they distribute their resources. Remco Evenepoel is the best time triallist in the world, for instance, but will Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe lean on his gifts as a rouleur in the opening kilometres or will they try to keep him as fresh as possible for his assault on the last two climbs? 

The individual timing also brings an additional layer of intrigue to the finale of the stage, given that co-leaders will be under no onus to wait for another. It means that the haul up Montjuïc could provide some early indications as to the hierarchy and internal relations at Red Bull, where Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz line up side by side, at Lidl-Trek, where Juan Ayuso is joined by Mattias Skjelmose, and even at UAE Team Emirates-XRG, where defending champion Tadej Pogačar is joined by debutant Isaac del Toro.

After a tense, high-speed lead-out through the boulevards of Barcelona, there will be no holds barred between the yellow jersey contenders on the finale up Montjuïc. The Tour has offered increasingly explosive opening stages in recent years, and that trend looks set to continue in 2026.