A brief history of modern Tour de France time trials: What difference will they make in 2027?

No Tour de France is designed in a vacuum. Every route is a response to what has gone before, and every decision is a recalibration. 

The aim of the game for technical director Thierry Gouvenou and his team isn’t to favour or penalise a specific rider – though that’s often a collateral effect – but to maintain as much suspense as possible for as long possible across the Tour’s three weeks.

The Tour was launched in 1903 to sell newspapers, and that commercial consideration has driven the whole operation ever since. The Tour isn’t just a bike race; it’s a television series of 21 episodes. ASO’s imperative is to keep as many eyeballs on their story for as long as possible, to keep a television audience captivated and their sponsors visible.

With that in mind, the Tour began to de-emphasise time trialling once Christian Prudhomme took over as race director from Jean-Marie Leblanc in 2007, and that trend became ever more pronounced a decade or so ago.

In 2015, there was just 13.8km of individual time trialling on the route, as well as a 28km team time trial on stage 9. Seven of the next eleven Tours featured fewer than 50km of individual time trialling. 

That was partly because two genuine French contenders had emerged, Thibaut Pinot and Romain Bardet, and neither of them was especially strong against the watch. But engineering a French victory wasn’t necessarily the end goal.

It was already enough for ASO – and for French television audiences – that Bardet and Pinot were in the match at all. Had there been more time trialling in that era, they might never have made the same impression. 

When Bardet placed third in 2017, his losses to winner Chris Froome in the race’s two short time trials (2:36) exceeded his final overall deficit of 2:20.

Those final pre-pandemic Tours were often tight, tactical affairs, with relatively minor differences between the contenders on summit finishes. With that in mind, ASO reduced the diet of time trialling accordingly.

Time trials felt even less significant in the initial years of the Tadej Pogačar-Jonas Vingegaard era, where the Big Two more or less broke even against the watch in 2021 and 2022. In the years that followed, ASO kept devising courses that seemed designed to keep that duel going, even as Pogačar hit back and then scorched ahead.

The presence of Remco Evenepoel and, perhaps as pertinently, the emergence of Paul Seixas, has changed all that once more. 

ASO has opted for a different tack in 2027, with 71km of time trialling split across the 38km test in the Loire Valley on stage 7 and the 33km leg around Toulouse on stage 16.

The clear hope is that the extra time trialling kilometres will put Evenepoel in yellow before the race hits the high mountains and perhaps even as the Tour begins its third week. And if Seixas, third in the Worlds time trial, benefits too, then so much the better. 

Meanwhile, Jonas Vingegaard, more subdued against the watch in recent years, will face a lot of work on his time trial bike in 2027.

“For a long time, the gaps in the mountains weren’t very big so we reduced the time trials accordingly, and now the gaps in mountains have grown again so the time trials are longer,” was Gouvenou’s explanation at Thursday’s presentation, when it was confirmed that the Tour will feature its highest quota of time trialling since Bradley Wiggins made hay with the 101.4km on offer against the watch back in 2012.

But how much of a difference will the time trialling in 2027 really make? This may be a data-driven era, but professional cycling isn’t (yet) a mathematical equation.

Evenepoel gained 1.07 seconds/km on Pogačar in the Thonon-les-Bains time trial in 2026, but that obviously won’t automatically translate to a ballpark 76-second gain on the Slovenian in 2027, especially if the five-time champion locks in his focus on the discipline.

There are all sorts of variables in the three weeks of a Tour, and the impact of time trials on the Tours since 2012 has varied considerably. Only rarely have time trials been decisive in terms of raw numbers. More often they have been pivotal in shifting momentum. And, on several occasions, they have made little impact at all. 

Let’s take a closer look, year by year and then category by category.

Time trialling has always been a key weapon in the Tour contender’s arsenal, but it’s striking that only three of the last fifteen editions have seen the winner owe his entire winning margin to his efforts against the watch. And perhaps even more strikingly, none of those Tours was won by Bradley Wiggins.

The first came in 2013, when Chris Froome beat Nairo Quintana by 4:20 overall. The Sky man’s first Tour victory will be remembered for his crushing solo exhibitions at Ax 3 Domaines and Mont Ventoux, but he also struggled against Quintana at Alpe d’Huez and again at Semnoz in the final week.

But Froome had a hefty insurance policy in the form of his time trial superiority. Between the flat 33km test to Mont-Saint-Michel on stage 11 and the hilly 32km time trial to Chorges in the final week, Froome gained 4:27 on Quintana. For good measure, he also picked up 14 seconds on Quintana and Movistar in the Nice team time trial.

Four years later, Froome lent on his time trialling to an even greater degree en route to his fourth Tour victory. He was struggling to make a difference in the high mountains, and even looked vulnerable to Bardet, who picked up 22 seconds on Peyragudes in the second week.

There was only 36.5km of time trialling that year, split between the opening day in Dortmund and the final weekend in Marseille, but Froome made it count. He gained 1:18 on Rigoberto Urán and 2:36 on Bardet in those stages, winning the Tour by 54 seconds overall.

The third Tour in our sample set where the champion’s gains in time trials were bigger than his winning margin was in 2020. Pogačar entered the final weekend trailing compatriot Primoz Roglic by 57 seconds. He put a shocking 1:56 into Roglic in the Tour’s only time trial, the 36km test to La Planche des Belles, to claim his first victory by just under a minute.

With 101.4km of time trialling on the course, Wiggins could scarcely have asked for a more amenable Tour route than the one he encountered in 2012. He duly took full advantage, but the time trials still didn’t account for his full margin of victory. 

All but 23 seconds of his 6:19 buffer over third-placed Vincenzo Nibali came from time trials, but ‘only’ two minutes of his 3:21 lead over Froome was earned against the watch. The rest came when Froome crashed and lost 1:25 on the first road stage to Seraing. 

But it would be remiss to understate the impact of the time trials, especially stage 9 to Besancon. By beating his Sky stablemate so soundly there, Wiggins shored up the internal hierarchy and ensure that team duties would put a brake on Froome’s ambitions in the Alps and Pyrenees.

In 2016, Froome’s 4:05 winning margin over Bardet included 3:31 gained in time trials, and the 2:49 he put into the Frenchman in stage 13 in the Ardèche essentially ended the race as a contest. 

But arguably the greatest Tour-defining time trial of the past fifteen years came in an edition with the lowest total of kilometres against the watch, team time trials included. 

For two weeks of the 2023 edition, Pogačar and Vingegaard seemed locked in a battle of fine margins, though the Dane insisted the race would be decided by minutes come Paris.

That seemed fanciful when Vingegaard entered the third week with a lead of just 10 seconds on Pogačar, but the rolling 23.4km time trial to Combloux on stage 16 altered the complexion of the race. Vingegaard gained an astonishing 1:38 into Pogačar there, putting his rival against the ropes. 

The knockout blow came on the Col de la Loze the next day, and Vingegaard’s final winning margin was 7:29 – but, as the tabloids would have said in yesteryear, it was the time trial wot won it.

The 2020s will go down in history as the Tour’s Pogačar era, but it’s hard to overstate just how fine the margins where between the Slovenian and Vingegaard in the early phase of their rivalry. A glance at their time trials in 2021 and 2022 offer some clues.

In Vingegaard’s first Tour, he was nine seconds quicker than Pogačar across the two time trials. After losing 26 seconds in the 27km test to Caen in the opening week, Vingegaard picked up 35 seconds on his rival in the final weekend time trial in Saint-Émilion. It was all moot, though, as Vingegaard’s struggles on two wet days in the Alps meant his overall deficit was 5:20.

Twelve months later, Vingegaard would get the better of Pogačar by dropping him on the Col du Granon and again at Hautacam to win the Tour by 2:43, and the race’s time trials made no difference in their duel. Pogačar gained eight seconds on Vingegaard in the 13.2km opener in Copenhagen and then the Dane was nine seconds faster in the final time trial in Rocamadour, though only after slowing to cede stage victory to teammate Wout van Aert. 

Small wonder ASO pivoted away from time trials in the years that followed.

There were four other Tours in our sample set where the time trials ultimately had little relevance to the overall story of the race. 

In 2014, the Tour’s lone time trial was a 54km test to Perigueux on the penultimate stage. Vincenzo Nibali had already long since secured overall victory, though for good measure he put another 29 seconds into Jean-Christophe Péraud, extending his lead to a mammoth 7:37. 

A year later, the dearth of time trialling meant that Froome gained just 11 seconds on Quintana on the opening day in Dusseldorf and three more in the stage 9 team time trial. All the momentum shifts in that year’s race came from mountains and splits, with the time trials a mere footnote.

And for the past three years, the time trials of the Tour have counted for relatively little in the grand scheme of things because of Pogačar’s dominance on all terrains. Pogačar gained 1:40 against Vingegaard in the two time trials in 2024 and 1:37 in the two time trials the following year, but the Slovenian didn’t yield an inch to his rival anywhere else on the course either. In the face of that supremacy, the time trials were almost moot.

Beyond Pogačar in 2021, there are only three other Tours in the past fifteen years where the champion succeeded in claiming overall victory despite being out-performed by the runner-up against the watch.

Surprisingly, given his background as a pursuiter, Geraint Thomas is on that list. The Welshman already had the Tour more or less wrapped up by the time he tackled the 31km time trial on the final weekend, and he settled for third there, 14 seconds behind an untouchable Tom Dumoulin. Thomas and Sky had previously gained seven seconds in the early team time trial, but ultimately, he owed victory to his and his team’s poise and control in the high mountains.

A year later, Thomas returned to take second overall. This time out, he gained 1:22 on his teammate Egan Bernal in the 27km time trial in Pau on stage 13, but the Colombian would claim overall victory thanks to his attack on the landslide-shortened Iseran stage. Bernal is the only Tour winner in the past 15 years to lose more than half a minute to his chief rival in the race’s time trials.

And in 2026, Pogačar conceded 28 seconds to Remco Evenepoel in the lone individual time trial on stage 16, though he had gained seven seconds on the Belgian in the opening team time trial in Barcelona. In any event, the races against the watch were again a footnote in Pogačar’s latest exhibition, as he sealed overall victory by 6:26 in Paris. 

What conclusions, then, can we draw from the past fifteen years about the slate of individual time trialling on the 2027 Tour route? 

In eleven of those Tours, the champion has outperformed his direct rival against the watch, which highlights the importance of the 71km of time trials next July.

And it’s worth noting that Tour contenders generally adapt to the specific demands of the year’s course. In 2015, with so little time trialling on the route, Froome seemed to neglect his work against the watch, mindful that the race would be won and lost in the high mountains. No contender can afford the same luxury as they build towards 2027.

But we have also seen that even relatively minor amounts of time trialling can add up to an enormous difference after three weeks, as Froome’s 2017 triumph demonstrated. And above all, time trials can create pivotal swings in momentum in a tight race, and rarely more so than in 2023, when Vingegaard unleashed that stratospheric display in Combloux. 

Never mind the distance – the context is always key in Tour time trials. In 2027, the distribution of the time trials is as important as their length. By placing a 38km time trial before the first mountaintop finish, ASO are surely hoping to force Pogačar to chase down a deficit rather than defend a lead. As if to reinforce the point, they’ve put another 33km time trial at the start of the final week.

The intention is clear, though the Tours of the past fifteen years also demonstrate another inalienable truth about the great bike race. The organiser does what it can to shape the story, but the ending is usually the same: the strongest rider wins.