The Tour de France will start in June in 2028 in order to avoid a clash with the Olympic Games, with the Grand Départ moving back to France in the heart of the Champagne region in Reims.
The Los Angeles Olympic Games get underway on Friday 14 July, 2028 and finish on Sunday July 30, 2028.
It was already expected that the Olympics in Los Angeles in the summer of 2028 would necessitate a shift in calendar for the Tour, and the organisers have now confirmed that the 115th edition of the race will start on Saturday 24 June, 2028 and finish on Sunday, July 16.
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The last stage is just three days before the Olympic time trial will be held a nine-hour time difference away in California on July 19, so riders like double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel may have to choose between the Tour and the Games.
The date shift is not the earliest that the Tour de France has occurred in a given year, however. In 1966, the organisers shifted the start to June 21 to avoid a clash with the FIFA World Cup.
The news was unveiled on Monday in Reims, where the Tour will begin in just over two years’ time. Following the Grand Départ in Barcelona this summer and that in the UK in 2027, this marks a return to French soil and only a second home start in seven editions.
UCI rules dictate that Grand Tours can feature one extra rest day once every four years in order to accommodate foreign starts, although the Tour’s recent starts in Italy in 2024 and Spain in both 2023 and 2026 crossed straight into France and did not require an early rest day, as will be the case with the UK next year.
In any case, Reims hosts its first Grand Départ since 1956, when André Darrigade pulled on the yellow jersey, though the city and the surrounding Grand Est region has featured prominently on the route since then.
The Grand Départ will be made up of four stages, covering the Marne, Ardennes, Meuse and Moselle departments, with six cities on hosting duties: Reims, Charleville-Mézières, Épernay, Metz, Thionville and Verdun.
No details of the routes for any of the stages have been revealed but we can expect plenty of rolling terrain to suit the puncheurs, and we’ll likely have some gravel, too. The Grand Est region to the east of Paris is best-known for its Champagne production, and the Tour has already seen stages among the rolling gravel tracks of the vineyards in recent years.
Julian Alaphilippe kicked off his sparkling 2019 Tour with a victory over the punchy hills into Épernay, while the gravel was last used in 2024 when Anthony Turgis won a thrilling stage inspired by Strade Bianche.
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