Foreign Grands Départs for the Tour de France might be fun, but we should put a cap on them

Adam Becket

News editor at Cycling Weekly, Adam brings his weekly opinion on the goings on at the upper echelons of our sport. This piece is part of The Leadout, a newsletter series from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. As ever, email adam.becket@futurenet.com - should you wish to add anything, or suggest a topic.

On Tuesday, it was announced that Barcelona will host the start of the 2026 Tour de France, meaning that four out of the last five Tours will not start in France - Copenhagen 2022, Bilbao 2023, Florence 2024, Barcelona 2026.

When you tell people that the Tour de France begins in Italy this year, it flummoxes them. Surely, this French totem, as French as strings of onions and a Gauloise with a terrible coffee, is always in France? But no. Foreign Grands Départs are nothing new, happening as long ago as 1965 - West Germany, for your information - and have now become a regular thing, rather than something special.

This is not confined to the Tour, or to men’s Grand Tours. The Vuelta a España will begin in Lisbon this year, and by 2026 will have started outside Spain’s borders as often as the Tour: Utrecht 2022, Lisbon 2024, Piedmont 2025, and Monaco 2026. The Giro d’Italia goes outside of Italy less, but 2018 saw the race start in Jerusalem, and 2022 in Hungary. This year’s Tour de France Femmes - a seven-day race - begins in Rotterdam.

Something has to give. Unless you have done an excellent job of ignoring the news, climate change is not just some far-off thing anymore, but a very real and terrifying problem that people across the world have to deal with.

Bike racing, especially Grand Tours, are a bad thing for the environment. Between all the vehicles for teams, the organisation, the media, fans, and all the travel associated with that, along with all the energy used, an enormous cost is created.

The climate crisis cannot be solved by changes within the niche sport of professional cycling, but its effects can be lessened. It is incumbent on us all to do our bit, and that includes sport. 

When races begin in far flung places - like the Giro in Israel, or the Tour in Denmark - the environmental cost only increases, with the whole circus moving around the world for just a few stages. A Grand Tour creates a lot of travelling as it is, but pushing it outside of the host country’s borders only creates more issues.

At the 2022 Tour, the transfer from Scandinavia meant extra flights for everyone concerned on a bonus rest day, with all the Tour’s lorries driving from Denmark to the north of France overnight. As much as I enjoyed my chartered flight from the south of the country to Lille, it was another logistical hurdle.s

If we’re serious about making a positive impact on the environment, we have to look at the huge cost to the climate of moving thousands of people and massive amounts of infrastructure around Europe just for three days out of 21.

Of course, Barcelona is a lot closer to France than Copenhagen, and might even be closer to where a lot of the professional riders live than Lille in 2025, but it represents a departure from tradition too.

I agree that Grand Tours should be allowed to cross borders and treat new fans to the spectacle of the world’s biggest races, but it detracts from the product if it’s something that happens every year, in my opinion.

Once every two years even seems like too often for the Tour to head outside of France, or the Vuelta to leave Spain, but this would at least be a start, better than the free for all seen at the minute. I’m sure that the foreign GrandsDéparts are great for the coffers of the organisers, a great money spinner, but profit should not come before the environment, or a sense of history.

Cycling’s governing body, the UCI, has hinted before that it would legislate against Grand Tours going too far outside of their traditional boundaries too often, but this does not appear to have happened yet. It would be good to see some progress on this front, as well as a continuing crackdown on long transfers.

Maybe I’m just tired of explaining that no, the Tour de France doesn’t always start in France, maybe I’m a curmudgeon, but for me, there is enough in Italy, France, and Spain to occupy a route designer, and to entertain fans. Four foreign Grands Départs in five years is too many.

This piece is part of The Leadout, the offering of newsletters from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

If you want to get in touch with Adam, email adam.becket@futurenet.com.