Lausanne Grand Départ announced for 2026 Tour de France Femmes

The Grand Départ of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will be in Lausanne, with the first two stages set to take place entirely in Switzerland. It will be the second time the Grand Départ takes place on foreign roads after the Rotterdam start in 2024.

The 2026 Tour de France Femmes will begin on Saturday, August 1 with a 137km road stage starting and finishing in Lausanne with a punchy climb in the finale. Stage 2 will start in Aigle, site of the UCI headquarters, and finish in Geneva at the end of a 150km leg that should lend itself to fast finishers. The race will return to France on stage 3, which starts from Geneva.

“It will be a delightful three days in the Swiss Riviera, whose picture postcard landscapes will set the scene for a formidable sporting challenge,” race director Marion Rousse said in a statement on Thursday.

“The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will get off to a cracking start, with the favourites clashing in the puncheuse-friendly opener, followed by a likely sprint finish in the glamorous harbour of Geneva.”

The 2026 Tour de France Femmes will begin on Lausanne’s Avenue de Rhodanie on the shore of Lake Geneva before heading towards Lake Neuchâtel for two climbs (3.5km at 6.1% and 3.7km at 4.5%) that could whittle down the peloton.

The finale in Lausanne features a climb of 2.3km at 5.4% in the finale, with the finishing line coming on Place Saint-François, an echo of the stage won by Wout van Aert in the men’s Tour de France in 2022.

Stage 2 will bring the peloton past UCI headquarters and the World Cycling Centre before passing through Montreux and Vevey. There will be three climbs on the agenda, but the last of them comes with 35km remaining, which should allow the sprinters’ teams to organise themselves ahead of the fast finish on Geneva’s Quai du Mont-Blanc.

After the Geneva start the following day, the race will cross the Franco-Swiss border before the end of stage 3 for a finish in an as-yet-undisclosed location. The full route of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes will be unveiled in Paris in October.

The 2026 Tour de France Femmes takes place from August 1-9, with nine stages on the agenda. The 2026 Grand Départ of the men’s Tour de France will be in Barcelona on July 4, with the race set to finish in Paris on July 26.

Unlike in 2025, when the Tour de France Femmes begins on the same weekend as the finale of the men’s Tour, there will be no crossover between the two events next year. Five days will separate the finish of the men’s Tour de France and the Grand Départ of the Tour de France Femmes.

“The race has grown so much that it was becoming super complicated to manage the two races at the same time,” Rousse told L’Équipe. “We’re confident based on our four years of experience: people will turn out for the Tour Femmes, even if it is five days later.”

The current iteration of the Tour de France Femmes began under Rousse’s directorship in 2022. Last year’s edition was held in a later August date to avoid a clash with the Paris 2024 Olympics, with Katarzyna Niewiadoma claiming overall victory. This year’s race gets under way in Vannes on July 26.