Tour de France Femmes 2026

The lengthy look forward to the 2026 Tour de France Femmes will lastly be over this week because the race kicks off in Lausanne, Switzerland on Saturday, August 1.

Now in its fifth version, the race has firmly established itself as a very powerful race on the calendar, and this yr’s instalment might carry us the largest and most tense GC battle but.

We have been analysing the contenders all yr spherical, however with simply days now till the 2026 version kicks off, Matilda Value has written our ultimate run-down of the Tour de France Femmes contenders, with Demi Vollering and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot poised for unbelievable duel with Ventoux finale.

Dani Ostanek took a finer have a look at the route to tug out the important thing and decisive phases, while Maria David went again by way of the historical past books to inform the tales of a number of the climbs on this version.

Simone Giuliani has gone contained in the mindset, preparation and ambitions of Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, while our unique Q&A with FDJ crew boss Stephen Delcourt lifted the lid on their method to the Tour.

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We even have Brodie Chapman on board as a columnist, penning her first pre-race piece in regards to the problem to return from damage, and she or he’ll be sending dispatches throughout and after the race, too.

On this web page and on our web site, you may discover complete protection of the Tour, from our countdown of options trying on the favourites, route, historical past and extra, plus every day on the bottom protection from Matilda Value and Dani Ostanek, delivering information, evaluation and interviews throughout the race’s 9 phases.

Necessary Tour de France Femmes information

2026 Tour de France Femmes route

ASO and race administrators Marion Rousse and Christian Prudhomme revealed the small print of the route of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes on the Palais des Congrès in Paris on Thursday, October 23.

The fifth version of the Tour de France Femmes can be held from August 1-9 with 9 days of racing, beginning with three phases in Switzerland. It is the second international Grand Départ to the largest stage race on the Girls’s WorldTour calendar, after Rotterdam in 2024.

As was the case in 2025, the 2026 version would be the longest but at 1175km complete distance, with a brand new excessive complete elevation achieve of 18,795m.

What to learn subsequent

The Swiss Grand Départ will kick off from Lausanne, with three phases in Switzerland, earlier than it heads into France for a Dijon time trial, and the important thing climbing days as much as Mont Ventoux – which can make an iconic debut within the Tour de France Femmes – and into Good for the grand finale.

See the complete particulars of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes route.

Cyclingnews can have stay protection of all eight phases of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, together with race reviews, galleries, outcomes, and unique options and information.

2026 Tour de France Femmes schedule

Tour de France Femmes Historical past

Cyclingnews has assembled a full listing of champions courting again to the primary model in 1955 and the unique girls’s Tour de France stage race held from 1984-1989 to the trendy Tour de France Femmes.

The ladies’s peloton raced their first official launch of the ladies’s Tour de France till 1984, gained by American Marianne Martin. It was an 18-day race held concurrently as the lads’s occasion and alongside a lot of the identical however shortened routes with shared end traces. The Société du Tour de France, which later grew to become a part of ASO in 1992, managed each males’s and girls’s occasions.

The ladies’s Tour de France led to 1989, and whereas ASO went on to organise girls’s one-day races like La Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, La Course, and the inaugural Paris-Roubaix Femmes (in 2021), the ladies’s peloton had not been included as a part of the official Tour de France for the previous 30 years.

Different girls’s stage races in France, not run by ASO, came about, together with the Tour Cycliste Féminin, which had began in 1992, and the re-named Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale, till it got here to an finish in 2009.

La Course by La Tour de France was then created in 2014 following a petition to ASO calling for a girls’s Tour de France. Le Tour Entier’s petition was led by Kathryn Bertine, Marianne Vos, Emma Pooley and Chrissie Wellington and secured 97,307 signatures. The occasion was held throughout numerous platforms, from a one-day to a multi-day occasion between 2014 and 2021.

Champions included Marianne Vos, Anna van der Breggen and Chloe Hosking within the first three editions from 2014 to 2016. Annemiek van Vleuten gained in 2017 and 2018, adopted by Vos in 2019, Lizzie Deignan in 2020 and Demi Vollering in 2021.

Regardless of its controversy, La Course had grow to be probably the most showcased occasions within the Girls’s WorldTour, and though the wait was longer than anybody anticipated, it lastly grew to become the stepping stone to the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

Tour de France males’s race director Christian Prudhomme made a long-awaited affirmation that Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) would launch a girls’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in 2022 with Marion Rousse because the occasion’s race director.

Zwift introduced that it will grow to be the title sponsor of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift on a five-year deal by way of 2026.

The primary version of the rebirth of the 2022 Tour de France Femmes was an eight-day race that started on the Champs-Élysées in Paris along with the ultimate stage 21 of the lads’s Tour de France and ended on La Tremendous Planche des Belles Filles, the place Annemiek van Vleuten (Movistar) was topped the general champion.

The 2023 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift route hit new heights with 956 kilometres and a grand finale within the Pyrenees with a mountaintop end on the enduring Tourmalet on stage 7 and a ultimate stage 8 time trial in Pau, with Demi Vollering successful the general title.

The 2024 Tour de France Femmes got here right down to a ultimate chase up l’Alpe d’Huez, with Vollering narrowly lacking gaining sufficient time to unseat Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-SRAM). The four-second margin of victory made the version the closest in Tour de France historical past – males or girls.

In 2025, the Tour de France Femmes was dominated by Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike), who retired from mountain biking after successful the Olympic gold medal in Paris, to give attention to street racing.

She gained by 3:42 over Vollering and Niewiadoma.