The biggest race in cycling is into its decisive week. The 2026 Tour de France — 21 stages, 3,333 kilometres, from a Grand Départ in Barcelona on 4 July to the Champs-Élysées on 26 July — is where three weeks of racing get settled, and this year the mountains have been saved for last.

The storylines

It’s the same rivalry that has defined the modern Tour: Tadej Pogačar against Jonas Vingegaard, with Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič trying to break the duopoly. The route front-loaded the Pyrenees in the opening week, ran through the Massif Central and the Vosges, and stacked the Alps into the final days — so whoever holds yellow now still has to survive the highest, hardest climbing of the whole race before Paris.

Behind the GC fight, the green jersey sprint competition and the polka-dot king-of-the-mountains battle add a race-within-the-race on almost every stage, and the breakaway hunt for individual stage wins keeps even the “flat” days worth watching to the line.

Why the final week matters

The Tour is decided in the mountains, and 2026 keeps the Alps for the closing stages — meaning the yellow jersey is genuinely live going into the last weekend. Then there’s the finish itself: for the second year running, stage 21 climbs the cobbles of Montmartre before dropping to the Champs-Élysées, so the old idea of the final day as a champagne-and-processions formality is gone. A slim GC gap can still be attacked on the run into Paris.

When to tune in

Stages roll out around 11 AM BST and finish mid-to-late afternoon; the racing that matters is nearly always the final hour, so 3 PM BST onwards is the sweet spot on most days. TNT Sports and discovery+ have every stage flag-to-line in the UK, ITV4 carries free-to-air live coverage of the business end plus nightly highlights, and Peacock is the exclusive home in the US.

No subscription, or watching from outside the UK? The free stream linked above carries the full world feed for every remaining stage into Paris. It’s a stacked closing weekend, too — Saturday 25 July has the Anthony Joshua fight in Jeddah and UFC Abu Dhabi, and the Tour’s Paris finish shares Sunday 26 July with the F1 Hungarian Grand Prix. Guides to all of them are on the site.