Tour de France 2026, the start will be from Barcelona

Rome, 26 February 2025 - The focus is still on a season, the current one, which is just at the very beginning, but cycling always looks beyond and in this case it does so to 2026, with the Tour de France announcing the departure from Barcelona.

The first 3 stages of the Tour de France 2026

After a totally home edition like the next one, with the start awaited by Lille il 5th July, the Great Boucle therefore returns to propose a start from abroad and to be precise from Spain. This time, unlike what happened in 2024 con l 'Italy, however, this is not an absolute first. The Tour de France had in fact started from Spain already 2 times higher: to be precise in 1992 da San Sebastian and, much more recently, in 2023 da Bilbao. The July 4th, 2026 instead it will be the turn of Barcelona, the scene on that date of a team time trial, a specialty that will return later 7 years of absence and which, notoriously, divides enthusiasts and insiders. However, woe betide anyone who imagines the classic inaugural 'plateau': the riders, in addition to the difficulty of having to coordinate with the rest of the team, will in fact have to climb the hills of the Montjuic (1,1 km with an average slope of 5,1%) and the Olympic Stadium (800 meters cwith an average slope of 7%). The next day the caravan will set off from Tarragona to then arrive, after a long and very bumpy journey 178 km, back to Barcelona, home to a circuit of 10,3 km to be done three times and with the menu still having the Montjuic el 'Olympic. The 6th July il Tour will start from Granollers before finally making the entrance in France through i Pyrenees, with the rest of the route of the fraction to be revealed later, presumably together with the rest of the route. It is probably a story for next autumn: first there is the experience of Tour de France 2025, still far away but not that far for the riders and teams who already have their sights set on the most important cycling race in the world.

Cataldo's statements

Among them there will be theXDS Astana, which he gave himself a year ago thanks to Mark Cavendish a historic overtaking on Eddy Merckx in the count of the stages won: apart from this success, the Kazakh team is experiencing complicated years, with the threat of relegation to avoid, as also declared by the sporting director Dario Cataldo to the microphones of CyclingFlits. "There are different periods for each team and ours is struggling with a rebirth attempt that began last season. It was not easy to understand what gaps we had and try to fill them and, moreover, good results are not built overnight". Certainly the arrival of the new sponsor has given new impetus to the entire project. "They are the first bike manufacturers in China and they offer a product that is meeting positive feedback from the riders. They have also increased the budget, but the team would not have accepted these conditions without the quality of the means offered to our athletes".